New Year's Eve

For New Year's Eve this year we continued on with a few traditions from years past. First off the kids requested German pancakes for breakfast which is one of our holidays breakfast choices. In the afternoon it's tradition for our ward to all go bowling, yes I said bowling. The ward rents out a bowling alley from 3-5 and I would say a lot of the families actually go. It's surprisingly a fun thing and gives us something family friendly to do so we aren't bored out of our minds. The kids love it too because they pass out goofy hats and necklaces which is all it takes for them to feel festive. After a few hours of bowling, which is plenty with kids our age, we came home to have our traditional fare.
We don't usually eat a meal on New Year's Eve but prefer to just munch on various appetizers. Randall still remembers when he was a little boy that his Grandpa Dutson who lived with them for a time would have lots of little fancy cheeses and different things for them to try. He really liked that and so now that's what we do with the kids. We try different cheese and various other goodies. At the stroke of Midnight, ya right, I'm not that nice... at 8 pm holiday or not, it was bedtime. It's not worth it to me to have the kids crying for a week because they are so overly tired from staying up late on one night. Before bed, we had a family toast with Martinelli's and then let the kids go outside and hoot and holler and blow their noise makers and then off to bed. Randall and I stayed up until a whopping 11pm and then went to bed.

I'm a bit funny though and get kind of sad if I don't get to watch the ball drop so I set my alarm for 11:55 so I could watch the ball drop via an app on my iphone. The neighbors and their kids sure made a lot of noise for the next hour or so which was kind of annoying but that was our big excitement to ring in the new year. I'm proud to say that it's common for me to feel a bit sad and nostalgic about the year coming to an end, but this year was not so, hurray!

One super sweet thing that Randall did though was when he went into work on Tuesday he said there was still confetti floating down all around Time's Square so he picked some up and brought it home for me. It totally made me day that he would know that I would love that!
I didn't do it this year but I read about something fun that I want to do this year. As the year goes you write down fun things you've done or memories throughout the year and keep them together and then read them on New Year's Eve of that year. I think that's something that would be really worth trying.