Happy New Year!

It didn't really hit me that the year was now 2011 until Craig announced that it is officially
1-1-11 (on his way into bed at 1 minute after the midnight hour!). I remember when I was Ella's age thinking about ANY year in the 2000's to mean we'd be travelling in flying cars and living a life ala 'The Jetsons' by now. I also seem to recall having it drilled into my gray matter that the US would be on the metric system so it was important for me to learn it properly...too bad about 'The Jetsons', but thank God about the metric prediction!

Here's a brief glance into our festivities this evening...

We shared our traditional meal of Shrimp Scampi before Craig headed out for church. It was our first attempt at a candlelit meal with all of the children, and the candle by Claire was only tipped over twice. Amazingly, no damage was done to the tablecloth (or other family members), and the candle never extinguished! Once Craig was off, I set to work making desserts, and created a nutella-cool-whip refrigerator pie (for Claire...nutella is her fav, and the whole deal was gluten & dairy free:-) chocolate covered pretzels and toffee. The kids were busy playing 'bratty family', where they act as obnoxious as possible and end up in fits of giggles, usually unable to continue the game longer than a half hour. Then they progressed to 'animal family' and good old 'cops & robbers'. Our kids have the best imaginations ever! I love hearing them play...

To help the little ones either stay awake late or give in and fall asleep early, I popped some popcorn and we settled down to a movie. During that time, no one slept, except for dad, who arrived about 20 minutes into the film. Once the movie was up, we played Wii as a family, and much to Natalie's dismay, we toasted in the new year at about 10:30pm. (Again, with the hope that once the toast was out of the way, the kids would feel o.k. about sleeping sooner...no such luck.) Then it was back to more Wii, building with straws & connectors (the 'it' toy in our house this year!) and reading. Finally, that magical, anti-climatic hour was upon us and after a round of Auld Lang Syne, our festivities were done. Everyone made it to midnight, except for Claire, who made it until 11:15pm, on a day when she didn't nap! Needless to say, her last few hours of 2010 were quite tumultuous:-).

Craig was tucking himself into bed at 12:01am, after combining his new year kiss with goodnight love...Natalie & David dozed as soon as their heads hit the pillow and Grace managed to fight off her curiosity at the noise of fireworks she couldn't see (too much cloud cover) and followed them off to dreamland shortly thereafter.

Ella is just now settling down and should be snoozing in another 5 or 10 minutes. I'm blogging about our exciting celebrations and will be joining my family in slumber (hopefully) by 1am.

I'll update the blog again in the next few days...especially now that I/we have a bit more down time, and I'm out of my vegetative state that starts Christmas day and lasts until my body catches up on sleep and de-stresses!

So glad to have had a night gathered with family; grateful for our health and the rituals that make up our lives.

Happy 2011!