Christmas Trip Days 1 & 2

Our fun filled traveling began at 3am on Friday 12/21 when we left Big D.  We traveled across Oklahoma and Missouri and arrived in St Louis at 4:30pm.  This was by far our longest one day trip with the crew and they did very well until about 4:15pm when chaos overtook the purple van and everyone melted down.  We recovered nicely though and checked into Sandau Haus on the campus of Concordia Seminary.  Sandau Haus is one of the furnished missionary apartments in the Woods married student housing at the sem.  We got to relive memories of living here, got some great deli food not available to us in Dallas.  Everyone fell asleep before 9pm which was definitely a blessing.

Day Two - We spent today, Saturday, 12/22 in St Louis.  Chris and Katherine made friends with the family living upstairs from the apartment we are staying in.  Rich took the little crew to play at the seminary quad and down at a little park right off campus.  On the way back to the apartment we ran into Dr Lessing, Rich's Hebrew professor and talked with him for a while.  The kiddos posed with Mary and Joseph in the Nativity scene that the Seminary Class of 2005 (Rich's class) bought for the school.  If you look closely at the picture, it appears that while Joseph is keeping a close watch on Baby Jesus, that Mary is more concerned about Joshua (as well she should be).  She might even be about ready to back hand him I think.  Later in the evening we went to the Way of Lights display at the Our Lady of the Snows Shrine in Belleville IL.  They had well over a million lights on their property with light characters telling the story of Christmas from Luke 2 and Matthew 2.  It was beautiful.  Unfortunately it was very rainy and windy so we had to bypass the nativity stable petting zoo, the camel rides, and some of the other stuff, but maybe next time.  We leave for Michigan tomorrow morning . . .