We had a few people over on Sunday to cheer on the Carolina Panthers. The girls were pretty excited to set up their chairs in front of the TV and giggled at the commercials. The game was not so exciting for them, and a bit of a let down for us too. Maybe next year Carolina!

Kaya is taking a dance class on Saturday mornings at our local dance studio. She LOVES it – much more successful than soccer class so far. I think the warmth of an inside dance studio is also preferable to her than a cold soccer field. I’m a little unimpressed with the actual amount of dancing they do (they spend too much time standing in line or sitting around) – I think they should just turn on Beyonce and break it down for 45 minutes, but she seems to love it anyway.

We’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately – last weekend to Columbus and this weekend to Atlanta. It turns out the January tennis circuit is quite happening. First we watched the Ohio State men’s team whomp Denver University. And yesterday we watched an old friend Jesse from Emory play a killer mixed doubles match. I’m not sure our Waffle-House-hat-wearing family fit in with the Chastain Park tennis elite (the first thing someone did was bring over a blanket for the baby to sit on after I put her in the (gasp!) bare grass), but we had a great time.

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!