Happy New Year!

I'm still working holiday traditions. There has been so many times when I hear someone describing what they do every year and I think "that's really cool- I should do that." Needless to say, that's about as far as I get. It gets complicated when we have so much to celebrate in such a small period of time, so I guess I can't be too hard on myself. My hope is to keep it simple, but still have each day retain it's individual importance. New Year's has been kept on the back burner as far as thinking of things to do, because a)we don't drink alcohol and b)we have small kids at home. There's a lot of restaurants that have awesome events where you eat lots of different dishes, enjoy the atmosphere, dance, etc, but that won't really work until we're empty nesters. So here are some things that we have started doing.

1. Appetizers for dinner. I love this. It's easy and you get a lot of variety and it's perfect for munching on while you stay up late. I would like to do fondue next year and see how complicated that would be, but this year we really enjoyed what we had. Veggie tray, meat and cheese tray, grapes, french bread pizza, chips and dip, cream puffs, leftover ice cream birthday cake (note to self- do hummus too next year). The Nyes brought some fantastic bacon wrapped wienies and cookie dough truffles. Did I mention I gained a good 5 pounds over the holidays? I have no idea why...



2. Poppers and Silly String in Abundance: The kids had a blast with all the poppers, noisemakers, silly string that my mom provided for the night. It wasn't that bad to clean up and the kids loved it.

If you can figure out how they work that is...



3. Let the kids stay up as late as they want. Rowan still talks about this. "Remember when I got to stay up until midnight?!?" He keeps wanting to do it again. He made it to midnight, but just barely.


4. Good Company: We were lucky enough to have my mom still in town on New Years and luckier still that our friends the Nyes were able to join us due to a canceled flight. I don't know how lucky they felt though :). Next year I'd like to break out the games- we forgot to this year because we were too busy chatting, but I think that'd be a great tradition too.

And that's it. Simple, but perfectly suited for the evening. I'm excited for next year!