Happy New Year

Let's start off by admitting that New Year's is one of the dumbest holidays.  Everyone on TV makes it sound super fun--it's a friend holiday right?  No lame family parties that you're obligated to go to.  You get to par-TAY with the people you actually like.  This rant doesn't need to go on forever, but even in college I struggled to find something worth doing on New Year's.  Probably goes hand-in-hand with the whole not drinking thing.  

Anyway, a few years ago, I found a way to make the holiday tolerable so this is what we do:

We pop balloons.  Each balloon has a time on it and at the appointed time, we pop the balloon and inside the balloon is an activity.  Allen, Sahar and Zolaikha even joined us this year and began the evening with a massive Nerf war while I finished up getting ready.

The balloon popping started with a glow stick dinner.  We actually had pizza, which I had to cook at the Wheatley's because our oven wasn't working because I failed to clean it for four and half years and the stuff on the bottom made the element explode, who knew?  So we had pizza but we put glow sticks under our plates and around our cups and turned the lights off, well most of them, to enjoy the chemical glow.

Next we made dessert--or at least I made dessert while the kids and Greg played some game that Allen had brought over.

Balloon three was "Do you want to build a snowman?"  The adults wrapped up all the children.  They thought it was quite fun.  It turned into a toilet paper war.

Balloon 4 was to use the toilet paper tubes to make decopoge noise makers.

Then glow stick blowing (put glow sticks in water bottles).  Zora thought this was a great game.

 We played a few other games but I can't remember what they were now.  At 9, "dropped the ball,"  shouted outside very briefly because it was below freezing, and drank some sparkling cider, which is disgusting.

Then the big kids played with Allen some more while I cleaned up and put Zora to bed.  Sahar took Zolaikha home and Allen went to Statesville to get an early start on the last day of the hunting season and Greg went to bed as he was meeting Allen in the morning.

 And then I made a huge mistake.  I told the older three they could stay up until midnight to watch the ball drop.  In California, we could have watched this at 9 and called it a night, but noooooo New York is in the same time zone as we so, midnight it was.   I thought we'd watch a movie, but the kids wanted to read (nerds).  So I read them all of The Fantastic Mr. Fox, hoping they'd fall asleep so I could go to bed.  Nope.  They all made it.  Then we watch the last 15 minutes of the party at Times Square, which seems like a lot of standing around and being cold before the ball finally dropped.  Around 12:05, Alice asked when the ball was going to drop, I said, that's it, we just watched it.  That's how lame it is.

Maybe next year, we'll go to bed on time.

The next day we had a big breakfast then headed over to Allen and Sahar's to make cookies and brownies for the Wheatley's farewell that afternoon.  More on that later.

I guess that since this is the New Year's post I should say something about my resolutions this year:

As always, read the entire Book of Mormon, which will be my 4th year running.  This year, I'm going to focus on teachings of Christ as suggested by President Nelson.

Second, learn how to play Imagine on the piano.  I've bought the sheet music and can almost play the first page.  It's a lot harder than it sounds.  It might take a while.

And third, go to the dentist.  I haven't been since before Rex's first birthday so I figure I'm due.