Happy Monday!
Can you believe it’s the last day of February already?!
Our district gets an entire week off in the month of February, which is something I’ve never experienced in my entire life! I was a little nervous about what I would do with the girls in the middle of winter for an entire week and in true Michigan Mother Nature form, vacation started a day early with a snow day the Friday before vacation started!
We celebrated the start of vacation with one of our new favorite things to make . . . breakfast burritos! Do you see that Trader Joe’s hash brown on top? We put them in the air fryer first, and they really stepped up our burritos!


Saturday afternoon Marie and I took our four girlies to Little Caesars Arena to see Disney on Ice!

Because of Covid these little ladies have never been downtown when they’ve been old enough to remember, and their reactions when they saw the “skyscrapers!” were priceless!

Our seats were awesome! (Special shout out to my dad who drove down to buy us the tickets so we could save like $60 in online ticket sales fees!)

The girls had a blast and the show was fantastic! Marie and I were blown away by how amazing the skaters were!

Proof of mamas! After the show we met up with the guys for dinner, but Marie and I were too busy drinking wine and chaperoning allllll the bathroom breaks for me to take any pictures.

On Sunday we had dinner with Grandpa Gary and Grandma Karen before dropping the girls off at my parents’ house for TWO nights!

One of those nights was Matty’s birthday! We had a great day just the two of us, which included going out for happy hour and dinner and then being back on the couch by 6:30pm. Woo hoo!

We Face Timed with the girls that evening, and Matty and I couldn’t stop laughing about Lucy’s face. Clearly, I’ve taught her nothing about proper camera angles! Side note: this was the only happy phone call we got from this little lady. She is going through a major separation anxiety phase and was NOT happy about being at oma and papa’s for two nights. We powered through and made her stay, but she was not happy about it and, apparently, was not very cooperative. Boo!

And because Lucy wasn’t being cooperative for my parents, they didn’t get to go bowling or to the show like they had hoped to so Emmy started crying her eyes out when I went to pick them up. My parents, God bless them, felt bad and allowed Emily to stay with them for one more night. Lucy happily high tailed it home to have some solo time with us and celebrate Matty’s birthday with some cherry pie.

All of our neighbors went on vacation for the week, so we were in charge of gathering mail for three families and feeding two guinea pigs. Lucy LOVED caring for the guinea pigs!

I organized the pantry a bit one night, and Lucy wanted to help. She organized this bin of gum and mints, and I’ve never been so proud. Now . . .if only I could get her to organize her bedroom like this!

Penelope Pudding is the greatest dog in the world!

I took the girls out to lunch and to run some errands one day, and we had a great little lunch date!

I woke up one morning and opened my eyes and this is what I saw! Penelope does not sleep with us at night, but we do open her crate early in the morning and let her cuddle for a bit. Usually she cuddles up with me. Clearly, Matty had woken up and decided he needed some cuddles! Side note: I debated about posting this picture because it shows the complete disregard we’ve had for painting/decorating our bedroom. We’ll get to it . . . one day.

Lucy had a playdate on Friday morning, and her friend just got a mini Goldendoodle puppy! He looked just like baby Penelope and was so sweet!

While Lucy was gone, Emily and I worked on her All About Me project for school, and I love the way it turned out!

We had some sunny days toward the end of the week, so we got out and got some fresh air.

The girls and I completed this 300 piece puzzle.

And we ended winter break with our third annual snow tubing day! These four little ladies are almost ready to just get up to the top of that hill and do it all themselves!

There are tons of combinations that the eight of us can come up with for riding. The most common theme is that the girls don’t want to tube with their own parents! haha One bummer for this year, though, is that we can no longer all join tubes and go down as a group of eight. It was SO fun to do that and so fun to watch others, but this year they limited it to four people per group.


After tubing we all went out for a late lunch/early dinner and then drove the hour home. When we got home, we took approximately ten minutes to unload the car and take a bathroom break before getting on our gear and trekking through the woods behind our house to the frozen pond. The girls discovered ice skating this year, and they are LOVING it.

Matty and I don’t have skates, so we just watched the girls and gave ourselves big pats on the back for being so active and outdoorsy . . . all. day. long. The Kissels are summer people through and through, but we’re doing our best to embrace these winter activities. That being said, you will NEVER find me embracing skiing.

It was so great to see Lucy build Emmy up and help her learn to skate.

These girlies could have stayed out there until dark, but mama was ready to go inside and warm up!

Wow, what a week! Today we’re back to our regular routine, and there is NO SNOW in the forecast so it’s looking like we’ll get a full week of school in! #knockonwood
Enjoy your last day of February ๐
XOXO
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