It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

 After almost two months of camping near Kansas City to spend time with our son and his family, it's time to hit the road again. We spent one last morning with these two little nuggets with our motor home parked down the street ready to go.

We've been here since Eli was a week old, and it's amazing how much he has grown and changed in these two months!

As the motor home rolled four hours south of Kansas City, we hit the snow that had fallen the day before. The roads were clear, but the ground was still covered when we pulled into our next stop at Mark's brother and sister-in-law's house. It's beginning to look a lot like a white Christmas! They have a place out back for our motor home to plug in. We love to be welcomed by our relatives that have room for a diesel bus to park!

After three days of helping them with a few move-in chores around their new house, we headed another two hours south to the Oklahoma City area. We stayed a couple nights at the Central Campground at Lake Arcadia. This is a first-come-first-serve campground with a unique check-in system that we have visited before, even though we've never scored a lake-side camping spot in those trips. But we were still surprised at the number of campers parked here in December right after a snow storm.

This was a great place to spend some time with family members that live in this area. We're still enjoying our Covid immunities, so we feel comfortable working on projects like the annual peppernut bake-off. Our grandparents made these nut-sized spicy cookies every autumn, and we love to eat them. This year we trained a couple of Denisa's sister's grandchildren in the art of rolling and cutting peppernuts. We're passing on the family tradition!

We moved the motor home to that sister and brother-in-law's yard so we could spend more time with family. Have we mentioned that we love it when relatives invite us to park at their homes? That meant more time to play games and bake together, including decorating sugar cookies with even more of their grandchildren.

This is our first trip to the Oklahoma City area since their devastating ice storm in October. We saw some trees that haven't been trimmed, and that showed us how the ice broke and battered the trees here.

Residential streets are lined with piles of broken branches, waiting for the municipal street crews to find time to pick them up.

We spent several nights at our son and daughter-in-law's house. They had trimmed most of the broken branches in their yard, but Mark spent a day helping with the big branches still resting on the pergola and shed roof.

Mark's view from the top showed the nervous home-owner watching from below . . .

as Mark hand-sawed the 300-pound branch into pieces small enough to throw down off the roof.

They were lucky to only have one board snap from the impact when that large branch from their pecan tree fell.

Their golden retriever thought it was awesome to have so many new chewing sticks just appear into his back yard!

After a little work, we had plenty of time to play. Denisa loves playing piano duets with Blake, and she is definitely enjoying it more than it looks. We played an entire book of Christmas duets on the piano . . .

and drove through the Christmas lights near their neighborhood. It's beginning to look and sound a lot like Christmas!

We were staying with them when the Christmas star made it's appearance on December 21.

We were in an urban setting with lots of ambient light, but the convergence of Saturn and Jupiter still made a bright dot in the southern sky.

Blake took a day off work to spend some time with us, enjoying a beautiful-weather December day in downtown Oklahoma City. We started the day checking out the over-sized Christmas ornaments in downtown.

We walked from there to Santa's workshop, where we could write letters to St. Nick in the shadow of Devon Tower.

It's a special time when you get to spend a December day with high temperatures in the 70s and no wind, with one of our favorite people! It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas!

We walked all around the new Scissortail Park that is adjacent to downtown Oklahoma City. We would walk around five miles in our loop today. This beautiful outdoor space has playgrounds, a water park, a lake with boats, dog parks, etc. etc.

One of those playgrounds includes a slide that is several stories high. A slider must crawl to the top of a climbing wall for the chance to descend down that very steep shiny metal tube. Denisa joined the small group of children making the climb to the top.

Mark and Blake said they could hear her trying to put on the brakes with her tennis shoes as she slid down that long tube. But you can see that she was still very surprised with the speed she was traveling as she got some serious air time coming out of the end of the tube.

We had a great time enjoying the unseasonably warm days before Christmas! We spent three more nights with Denisa's other sister. Our time there was spent playing cards and doing some shopping that we'll have to tell you about in another blog. But for now, we are certainly enjoying these fun days as it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas!