Happy New Year!

So, it's 2009, a whole new year. But as many years removed as I am from teaching, there is one thing that still hasn't left me yet. Maybe it's because I'm a parent of school-aged children now so I still live by a school calendar, but to me, January never feels like a new year. The year seems to start in late August/early September when the new school year starts. Now that we have kids on a year-round school schedule and their new school year starts in early July, maybe January will start to feel like the beginning of the year....after a few years. LOL

We do celebrate the New Year in the House, though. Even if it doesn't seem like a new year. Here are the highlights from Dec. 31, 2008:

The kids all had bags with clocks on them. The clocks told them what time to open the bags.

Their first bags had the Wii remotes in them. So we had a FamiWii Mario Kart tournament. That booster seat rocks.

The next bags had paper plates and plastic forks in them. The kids were a little puzzled by that until Alec figured out that they were for the kids to use to eat the confetti cake.



Here's what it looked like when that realization happened:

There were questions about how many of the kids would actually make it to 12:00 to ring in the New Year.

There's one answer. He made it to the cake, which I think was his goal. But he missed the next bag, which contained balloons. We played a very energetic game of balloon volleyball. Any other kids who were starting to poop out were very quickly revived by that!

The wrestling match ended the volleyball game and we brought out the next set of bags. Each of those had a card for us to write our 2009 resolutions on. Then we made a time capsule and put the resolutions inside. We'll open it on December 31, 2009 and see how we did.


It was after 11:00 by the time we finished the time capsule. I couldn't believe Erin was still up. Roger wasn't even awake! He missed the best bag of all! It was 11:15 and the kids all sat on the couch to open bags that had nothing but a post-it note stuck to the bottom. The notes read, "WATCH YOUR BACK!" So they all looked behind them where I was standing with a camera and a can of silly string!

Yep, I think that one was my favorite bag of the night. The running and screaming woke Roger up so he was with us to open the final bags at 1 minute till midnight. The bags had horns, streamers, and a couple of handfuls of confetti. We watched the ball drop in New York and they blew their horns and threw their confetti.

It was a lot of fun. We watched Robbie Madson (I probably butchered the spelling of his name - sorry Robbie) jump his motorcycle up to the top of the Arc de Triomphe in Las Vegas and then back down. Then we all went to bed and slept until 9 or 10 the next morning!

Happy New Year, everyone!