Winter Beach Excursion

Who says you can't go to the beach even when its cold and the middle of January?  No one... so we do.  This particular weekend in January we were lucky to be joined by our good friend Sarah.  I can tell you that there was lots of board games, especially Monopoly happening.

Lily Awards Ceremony

Two times a year, Lily's elementary school has awards.  I am happy to report that Lily has gotten an award at every ceremony.  This time, it was for being a math super star.  I might also mention that during her parent teacher conference earlier in the year, her teacher informed us that she couldn't keep up with Lily's math progress and had to keep finding second and third grade material for her to work on.  Here she is looking as proud as we are...

Snowmeggedon 2016

Unfortunately January proved to be a tough month for us in many ways.  Chris spent the entire month  clear through March in Illinois.  Good family time for him, but Lily and I missed Dad in more ways than one.  Yes, we did get 36 inches of snow in a 2 day period of time.  Yes, Lily did have no school for 6 full school days.  Yes, our road didn't get shoveled for a full five days.  But luckily... and I was so happy for this... we kept power, we stayed warm, and we had enough food.  Plus we got to enjoy a little time playing in the snow. And shoveling... and shoveling... and shoveling some more.

Gymnastics

Lily has been taking a weekly gymnastics class that started in September and goes through June.  When we returned home in January from South Africa she got right back into her gymnastics.  They put on a real show when we returned.  I must say Lily has some really amazing teachers and classmates in gymnastics.  Here cartwheels and hand stands are really coming along.

Beach in December

In early December we were also lucky enough to have a few really great weather weekends.  Here we  are enjoying a weekend at the beach with Lily and her good friend Rut.

Catch up time

O.K. so I'm really not lame due to my lack of posting for the last four months.  I am completely not to blame.  Our Mac of some 8 years had some compatibility issues with blogger system and thus no new posts.  Finally having Chris back he was able to install a new operating system on the Mac for free (yes Apple is AMAZING!) and I'm back in business.  Some I'm catching up with all my posting.  Sorry.

Here are some pictures I found from the holiday season before we headed to Turkey and South Africa.  I think I must have taken here with my iPhone and forgot I had them.  We sure had a great time around the holidays.

Wednesday night Craft Club

Couple more photos from NYC.  Can't wait to go again.

Our big holiday vacation - Part 3 (Kruger National Park - Safari)

We definitely saved the best part of our vacation for last.  We got to spend 5 days on safari in Kruger National Park.  Based on our prior experience, we chose to do it much like the South Africans do and used the National Park's accommodations.  Not necessarily 5 star, but clean and comfortable for the most part.  Although the air conditioning was on the fritz at our first camp.  Luckily our second camp gave us more a/c than we needed.  The weather was warm (think 100 - 115 each day), but we seemed to adjust o.k.  While this was Chris and my third trip to Kruger, it was Lily's first and definitely did not disappoint.  We saw more animals and more variety than we ever had in the past.  Likely because the area was in a drought and many animals could be seen around water holes.  The highlight was seeing lions every day (some people come to Kruger and never see lions at all).  Many days we actually saw more than 1 pride.  And we saw many baby lions too.  Lily loved the Vervet monkeys that while annoying (they like to snag everyone's food) they are also incredibly cute.

Here are just a few (of the many) pictures from Kruger.