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.

Below are six photos from Nolan’s hip hop class. They put on a small mini-performance for parents and relatives just before winter break. Unfortunately this year it was on a Tuesday so I had to go solo! Anyway, all of the kiddos worked their little butts off–that’s for sure. Oh and don’t forget to notice Nolan is wearing his favorite outfit: orange sweats, orange robot sweatshirt and orange t-shirt underneath. He is still such a “color” kiddo…some day this will be good blackmail material! :)

I’m hoping to have some you tube videos uploaded soon from video footage I took. Yes, I was the only parent there with camera in one hand and video camera in the other!! The hula-hooping segment is really good. Nolan has been working really hard and of course there was one girl who could hula while standing, go down to her knees and then stand back up—without dropping the hoop!

Click me for the hula hoop video footage!!

Click me for the robot twist-o-dance!

Click me for a little this or that! Oops—I cut that one short!
Click me for the ending!

Yes, you really are looking at a Darth Vader pancake (and mold)! For the annual Fortlage/Senecal Christmas breakfast we decided to use the force for our food.

And they were delicious of course!

A modern day definition of 4 food groups??

Opening presents together was fun too…although I think Nolan’s gifts were the most exciting:

A “first” hockey stick…

and a new “butt bank”! What, you don’t have one of those? You know…you put the coins in the butt crack and the little thing farts until it sounds like it just might explode!! (Yes, that is Kelly with his laughing head down in the background.) Thank you Auntie Robyn and Uncle Pete! Check back soon…there will (hopefully) be some youtube video footage of this too!

And it’s not a delicious breakfast without some silly photos…

and sledding at Nolan’s elementary school next door!

Check out this next series…it’s taken practice (primarily with a busy boy) to get good at timing action shots. I nabbed everyone except for myself—that may have to be a 2011 goal!

Yes, that is 6ft tall Uncle Pete in that pilates V pose!! I think that should be on their Christmas card next year…what do you think? I hope everyone had a great holiday season. As for the rest of you, well, it’s almost over! I hope you enjoy the pics! We’ll be back soon!

Check out our homemade bowling game. We’re testing it out before we take it to school.

We thought this soccer ball would be perfect, but I think it’s too small, soft and lightweight!

Oh yeah…bring on the lightning ball…strikes!

We did a turkey project at school and we all had to write what our favorite Thanksgiving food is. I said and wrote ice cream and cake…even though we don’t ever eat cake and ice cream at Thanksgiving!

Photos from our family fun day in school that Mama organized…

We had a yummy snack called gorp, which was whatever Mama decided to make it and we graphed how many we got of each piece. (In case you were wondering gorp is a type of trail mix where you can put anything you want in it.)

YES!! 7+ down from the farthest away carpet square…

dancing with my best friend, Rachel…

BINGO!!

Domino towers…

tic-tac-toe—hey wait a minute Garrett, if you are X’s you can’t be O’s!!

Making the two buckets balance…well, that just means they need to have the same amount of seeds!

Lucky to have family for family fun day…

Rare photo op…check check November family fun day done.

Special video of family fun day/Thanksgiving luncheon day musical presentation…starring Nolan, classmates and Mrs. Johnson! You can check it out below orHERE!!

and in case you didn’t get enough…there’s a second one HERE!!

Now that that’s over…it’s time to settle down with some yoga warriors!

What a great day. Let’s eat!! We hope you all had a great Thanksgving. Happy December!! See you next time!

My November “fun day” for Nolan’s class went off without a hitch, but you’ll have to wait for the details of that day—including some awesome singing video footage.

Hmm…I think we left too many blank spots on Nolan’s home decorated turkey, what do you think?

Now for a recap…

For a slightly early birthday present I bought Kelly and Nolan Badger football tickets.

It turned out to be a whopper of a game—check out the score board (oh, oops…you can’t see it. Well, it was Badgers 49 and Austin-Peay 3 at half-time.)

Rockstar parking for the game—oh yeah, that’s my crazy kiddo too.

Kelly and Nolan also had a special father/son day (in Oct.) as they traveled to Milwaukee to see the band Muse and spent the night in a slightly fancy hotel. (sidenote: The band just recently won an AMA for best alternative rock band– yeah!) I heard the concert was great…

although the pictures make it look like the hotel was great too!

While in Milwaukee Kelly and Nolan checked a few of the kid friendly museums…like the Discovery Science center. You are looking at a tunnel in the acquarium.

They also found some climbing time on my favorite museum…and the decorative sails have changed! Cool photo, Kelly!

And of course they also found time to conduct the local symphony, check out the Les Paul guitar exhibit, take a self portrait and make a few phone calls… :)

Somewhere between birthday, Muse and Halloween Kelly also made a trip to Japan. This is downtown Osaka.

He had no problem mixing business with pleasure…I mean who doesn’t dream about eating Eel every day??? (ewww!)

Uhm, I’m speechless. Just to clarify: yes, that is the floor and (miraculously) it can flush!

Somewhere in there Kelly turned another year older too. That (4-0) milestone keeps inching closer any ideas on what kind of torture he should endure?? :) (p.s. Yes, those are fleece pj pants that look like money!)

Way back when…(while I was sick of course) I hosted my first ever Pampered Chef party. It was a blast and even went a little x-rated. Who knew how hot a bunch of moms and friends could be???

Well, this certainly helped with the mood. My good friend Heather (she is Nolan’s buddy Kyle’s mom) got up to try out the chopper and well, she had a little problem hitting it hard enough to make it chop! She said she was going to work on getting stronger at home. ;)

Nolan has certainly grown up a lot in the last 5.5 years. I am hoping to do some kind of special recap post again for the end of the year. I hope you will all come back and view that too. We hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving!! See you next time!!

That’s it…I’m taking over this site. No more words Nolan speak…it’s all coming straight from me. So, when all of you were younger was there a mom at your school that seemed to appear every time you turned around? Art projects, field trips, musical shows, etc.? Well, I’ve been dubbed “that mom” and although I can probably give some instances where that’s not exactly true, I do fit the bill 85% of the time—and that’s perfectly fine thank you very much!

Although I do have to say…I think Gran’Mary was ready to go home after her second trip here because she needed a vacation! Really…the Oriental Trading people lied…we needed 3×5 pics not 4×6 and so we just HAD to stay up until 11:30pm resizing photos and frames–that wasn’t the original plan!!! C’est la vie, n’est pas?

Okay it’s photo time…let’s review some of the past three months all at once! Follow closely!

Nolan thinks Kindergarten rocks…and is completely exhausting. I’m sure all of you have heard of those “abs of steel” type work-out videos. Well, they’ve missed their mark. Nolan’s abs from excessive monkey bar swinging are hard as rocks. Who knew…that we all just needed to go play on the playground some more!

Nolan has found his niche in the lunchroom as well…among new and old friends.

This is that moment where you see for your own eyes…that it’s no longer as cool as it used to be to eat lunch with mom. “Mamaaaaaaa…everybody’s looking!!”

September in Kindergarten meant an excessive use of paper. In fact, I think we might have to add on an additional room to store all of the paperwork that has been coming home. Of course in living up to my “that mom” title I have kept EVERY single piece thus far—even the duplicates. I will figure something out…I just know it! (The pencil words says “the hamster”…yes, we have a jokester on our hands!)

During her second visit to Wisconsin this fall Gran’Mary was able to sneak into Nolan’s classroom and read some special books twice. The kids love having “mystery” readers! Anyone else wanna come up and read?

We visited the ultra spooky/haunted house again this year (while Gran’Mary was visiting) in nearby Cross Plains.

There is stuff in every nook and cranny around the yard…

and even in the bushes!

and this year they got Papa good!! (Hmph…and he says no one can ever scare him!!)

This year we all dressed up as characters from Avatar: The Last Airbender (not the blue people Avatar). In case you have no idea what we’re talking about you can view the movie info here or the book/cartoon info here. The movie was only ok—the special effects were great, but the acting was very rusty, but the books and cartoon are amazing. If you like Japanese anime check ‘em out!

We dressed up and celebrated Halloween at the Reuhl family’s annual Halloween party.

More abs of steel!

We even had a visit from Queen Amidala from Star Wars!

Someone somewhere had this great idea to relay race with green slime…

however, after one look of the slime…I was able to pass by claiming photographer status. My hands, fingers and nails were very grateful!

Running across the grass with an egg in a spoon was a little more my style…

and wrapping things with toilet paper…well, what can I say other than that comes naturally!

And apparently Nolan is going to grow up and be an amazing bowler! One pumpkin, 6 bottles and two strikes!

Sorry it’s a little blurry, but in case you weren’t sure…this airbender can ice skate!

Round two for Halloween parties…

and this airbender, Aang, has got some moves. (Maybe even abs of steel part 3??)

And maybe a gut of steel too. Yes, these are chocolate cupcakes that the kids were then allowed to decorate with marshmallows, candy corn and m&ms!! Seriously! I think this is why these things are always served just before the kids go home!

“Mama…Halloween is only once a year!!”

And then there was trick-or-treating of course and this time…

they got Mama AGAIN! (The coffin opened as a real person was hiding in there!) I think I might stay in the street next year! I hope everyone had a great Halloween. Stay healthy, watch out for lingering spooks and hopefully we’ll see you again soon!