When you’re trapped inside for two days from snow/ice, you gotta get creative.

We got some snow in Durham the last couple of days — enough to make the streets a mess and cancel all planned activities. Not quite the 2 feet of snow our kin up north got – but enough to play!

We celebrated Max’s birthday this weekend – can’t believe he is TEN years old. Time flies, for certain. Happy birthday to the best dog a family could ask for.

Kaya has been asking to go ice skating for weeks. We finally took her on Sunday. Except we didn’t figure out that the local place was closed and the semi-local place was closed until after we left the house. Kaya was so upset when she found out it was closed that we ended up driving to Raleigh for some evening ice skating. It was lovely. I expected Kaya to dislike it when she found out how hard it is to skate at age 3, but she LOVED it.

I have been stressing about giving a talk at the 2016 GU Cancers Symposium in San Francisco and am proud to say it is OVER and I SURVIVED! I’m not sure how many hundreds of people attended the talk, but it was a very very large room filled with the top world experts in kidney cancer listening to me give a talk on kidney cancer – intimidating to say the least. Here’s a photo a friend snapped of me on the megatron. I am very excited to head home – Kaya said on the phone tonight, “Mommy, was that 3 days? I think it was 51 days” Feels like 51 to me too!

I wasn’t around for this one, but found this gem of a photo on Tommy’s phone.

Nothing gets a baby more excited than a cup of milk!

I caught up on some grant writing over the holiday break. Luckily Kaya was around to help with the edits.

A little doorway fun at Gammy and Pop-pop’s house over Christmas

Most regard the Battle of Chancellorsville as a landmark civil war battle. We will forever remember it as that time it took Kaya 20 minutes to poop at the Battlefield of Chancellorsville (which is also on the side of the road on the way to Grandpa Lipps’s house). It’s amazing how many tourists come through there in 20 minutes on New Year’s Day. She’ll really appreciate me internet-izing this photo when she’s 16.