I went to my second ever scrapbooking retreat and managed to not come home with a bleeding ulcer…yeah!

Let’s see if you can guess???

Yes, that is frosting on top…that appears to be larger than the cupcake itself!

However, while I was there we were blanketed with beautiful heavy wet snow—and we were all thankful that we didn’t need to shovel/snowblow!

And all the way home…

I could not…

stop…

taking photos!!!

And who says Kindergarten is all fun and games? Nolan has been working his little butt off since the first day of school, but he loves it!

The class has to know all of these words by sight by the start of first grade. Nolan is about 75% of the way done and doing great. It’s so much fun having him read to us now!

Oh and there’s always time for a little “th” coloring… :)

Kelly showed off one of his awesome Christmas presents from me during a Christmas morning jam session—if you haven’t checked out the TV show called “The Big Bang Theory”—you’ve got to check it out!

I think there was a lot of Bazinga in the air. If you’d like to see/hear a video of the jam session, just click “play” below!

We also headed north to Petoskey, MI for New Years. It was a really long 9.5 hours, but in general Nolan and Kelly both did really well.

We made our traditional stop at Big Boy…

And enjoyed the Mackinac Bridge winter view—we’ve been traveling to MI more in the warmer months as of late.

We went down to the local winter sports park—and that was a blast. Nolan and I both think we need an ice rink in our yard now too. The video below is short skating shot!

The sports park also had a fun sledding hill. Note to Madison’s Elver park: Walking on designated path to go up a hill is low cost and makes a lot of sense! I’ve added a sledding video too!

Of course a tow rope would be nice too, but really I’d be happy with the designated walking “up” path.

What’s a really fun indoor energy burner? HULA-HOOPING!!! Nolan has been practicing this some in his hip hop dance class, but I think he full perfected it by week’s end in Michigan. He even started to add hand movements, turning, walking and talking (of course). Check out the fun video footage…and see if you can quell your urge to jump up and hula hoop too!

Nolan was so excited to have a play mate at last. Hooray for Mary Ellen. Thank you Lisa and Greg for driving the 2 hours to come and visit on New Years!!

Last, but not least, we had to head home. The first part of the drive was well, a giant swirling white wall. However, we really lucked out this time…as we drove through the wall and found crisp blue skies on the other side. Thanks for checking out the new picks. We’ll see you next time.