Happy 2015, everyone. I hope you all had a nice evening yesterday and enjoyed your New Year's activities. Believe it or not, we didn't party too hard at our house. With 5 kids, the party tends to revolve around them instead of you, and when the party revolves around 5 kids ranging in age from 8 to 2, it tends to be pretty tame. The good news for Erica and I is that we weren't big party animals before we got married and took on the responsibility to replenish the human race by ourselves, so it hasn't been a huge adjustment to stay in and "party" with the kids.
This year, Erica wanted to add something new, and it was kind of cool. We went through a list of questions with each of the 3 oldest kids and typed up their answers, so we can save them for posterity. The questions were things like "What was your favorite memory from 2014" or "What was your favorite food." It was fun for the kids, because it was all about them, and it will be fun for us and hopefully them, as they get older to look back on what their answers were. If we keep it up from year to year, then we will be able to see how they're growing and changing with time. We also asked them what they were looking forward to in 2015. We got some good answers as Johnny is looking forward to his baptism and Jak is looking forward to starting school. We also had them set some goals, things they wanted to work on in 2015. It was a lot of fun.
After we did that, then the party began. I had gone earlier in the day to buy a bunch of snacks and treats for our New Year's Eve party, so I got all of that stuff out, and we brought it downstairs. The kids made up some beds on the couch and on their bean bag chairs on the floor. Then we settled in to watch movies until 2015 hit. The first movie we watched was The Incredibles, which is my favorite Pixar flick. Hands down. The kids weren't excited at first because it's not they are as familiar with, but once we started it, they were really enjoying it. After that film finished we purchased How to Train Your Dragon 2 from iTunes and watched that. Johnny was way excited. He loves those movies. That was pretty much our evening.
All the kids planned on staying up until midnight. The 3 older kids get that that's what you are supposed to do on New Year's, so they all wanted to do it. Lucy is always just glad to stay up as late as we will let her. Before the night began, my wife and I engaged in our favorite New Year's game. We took bets on who was going to last until when. My money was on only Eliza making it all the way to the end. Of course, at the time Lucy was already asleep, and I thought she was down for the count.
Once our bets were placed, then the fun begins. Watching the kids go down and out one by one. Maren didn't count. We brought her upstairs and put her in bed. She didn't have a choice. Jak was the first to fall out. He fell asleep in the middle of the entry way to our family room in the basement, which was probably the most inconvenient spot, but we didn't want to risk moving him, so we left him there, and spent the rest of the night stepping over him. This was about halfway through the first movie.
About this same time, Lucy woke up from her nap. At that point, I knew she was going to make to the end. She was now fully rested and ready to go. At the end of The Incredibles, Johnny, Eliza and Lucy were still going. So we started the next film, which Johnny picked. Then he proceeded to fall asleep about halfway through. He loves the Dragon movies, but he was also tired. My boys do not do late nights very well. When they are tired, they go to sleep, and it rarely happens that they stay up or awake later than 9 or 9:30. Jak and Johnny were out, it was now just Erica and I and the 2 girls.
We only had about an hour left, so we didn't want to start another movie that would tempt Eliza to want to stay up later than midnight. Instead, we picked an episode of the BBC's Top Gear. Yes, we love that show. It can be pretty hilarious, and the episode we watched was pretty good. It finished right about midnight, so once it was through, we just waited a few minutes and then said Happy New Year to each other, and Lucy and Eliza, who had both made it. At that point, I brought Lucy upstairs to put her in bed, and she wasn't happy about that. She didn't want to go to bed, she wanted to stay up. She cried for about 30 seconds, then her head hit the pillow and she was out. Eliza wanted to watch something more on Netflix, so we started something for her and we went to bed. I don't think she made it very far into whatever she was watching before she was asleep.
That was our exciting New Year's Eve. I loved it. We were all safely at home, we had fun, and the kids I think will remember that kind of stuff as they grow up, and hopefully look back on it. As I was going upstairs to bed, I thought about my trip to Walmart earlier in the evening. The guy ringing up my groceries asked if I had anything fun planned, and I told him I was just spending it with the wife and kids. Then he asked if I was going to get wasted. Uh...No. Then he proceeded to tell me that he was going to get wasted, it was one of only like 5 nights of the year that he gets wasted. Sounds great, I hope he enjoyed it. I would rather spend the evening with the people that matter the most to me sipping my pink lemonade. To me, that's living life.
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