How many cute kid pictures can one blog hold?

Hang on to your hats--we're going on a fast two-week tour of visiting our family back in Oklahoma. We were blessed to get to see our children, our parents, all of our siblings and spouses, and most of our nieces and nephews while we were in the state. That would be 3 parents, 10 siblings and spouses, and 16 nieces and nephews. We adored spending time with our nieces and nephews as they grew up, and now we are enjoying their children as well. We noticed that we only took pictures of our great nieces and nephews! We got to spend time with 19 of these little people during this two weeks. We genuinely love to play with children, including doing art projects.

Mark specializes in rough and tumble play that usually includes screaming and laughing, and pleas for him to throw them into the air "one more time." Denisa prefers art and cooking projects and playing with dolls. But her very favorite thing is playing piano duets with these young musicians. Here is the first picture with a great nephew playing the piano with her.

We got to play with another set of nieces and nephews on another evening. The youngsters were begging for a game of hide and seek. We had so much fun with this game that the adults kept playing after the children grew tired of it. It's hard to take pictures of people playing hide and seek, so we are using a picture from six months ago. This is one of our favorite pictures of one of our great nieces carrying around one of her hens last time we visited.

We include that picture now because they brought us a dozen eggs today, and we learned something new. The two eggs on the far right are a little smaller because they are guinea eggs. The eight in the middle are normal-sized hen eggs.

But the two cute little eggs on the far left of the picture above are from the very young hens that have just started laying. The first few eggs of a young pullet are small in size, and we got two of these coveted eggs!

Our timing was great, and we got to attend a family reunion while we were in Oklahoma. We have another favorite picture with Denisa surrounded by more musical great nieces and a great nephew.

Denisa shared the piano bench with three little nieces. They are also branching out to the guitar, and we had a great nephew play with us as well. It was the girls' idea to practice over and over, and then present a concert at the reunion. We practiced over the next two days before presenting a guitar and piano concert to a standing-room-only crowd.

Some of the younger nieces were too young for the piano, but Denisa also likes to play with the kittens with them.

We tried to squeeze in enough family time, games, and hugs to last for another four months until we return for Thanksgiving. But before everyone left, Denisa got to have one more piano session in yet another location with a great niece. We realized that this was the third piano picture of the blog. 

It's been a good family time and we enjoyed seeing our children, our parents, our brothers and sisters, and our nieces and nephews! Even though we didn't get a picture of all 19 of our great nieces and nephews we think that all of them are great!