We started gearing up for this celebration at about 7:30 pm, Pacific Standard Time. This is not as much lead time as you think; we celebrated New Year's Eve along with the great people of La Paz, Bolivia, which is to say that we celebrated the arrival of 2011 at 8pm Pacific Standard Time. We like a party, but we like our little people sleeping even more.
We got the kids all ready for bed, decked out in fleecy pajamas. Then we put sweatshirts and vests and shoes right on top of the pajamas and headed out the back door. This alone constituted a party for our children -- running around in the backyard, in the dark. What can we say? We're exciting people.
To add to the festivity, we distributed glow sticks (which we'd had in the kitchen cabinet, leftover from when I'd stocked up at Target's dollar spot back in October) to the children. (We'd had glow sticks on the brain, given the glow stick celebration at the end of the nativity video we'd been watching all Christmas.)
For the next fifteen minutes, our children just ran around our little backyard, waving their glow sticks, cheering in the dark.
Do we know how to throw a party, or what?
This is a dark and lousy photo, but you can see that I'm not exaggerating --
our children were racing around our backyard, cheering.
Jim brought his macbook out with us and, thanks to a friend's code-writing genius, we used a nifty little countdown clock to count down the seconds until the New Year (in La Paz). At the stroke of eight there was much cheering and hugging and toasting (with apple cider for the kids and a bit of red wine for Mama and Daddy). Our neighbors probably think we're insane, but we were having a lot of fun.
In fact, counting backwards from ten was so much fun that we did it all over again at approximately 8:02. The counting, the hugging, the cheering, and the toasting.
Kathleen loved the countdown. Madeline loved the glow sticks. John David loved the juice. He drank from his sisters' glasses while they were running around. Luke loved his nap.
We just loved being with our (very enthusiastic) little people.
Kathleen took this photo of us... It was her second attempt. Her first was just our midsections. We had a good laugh over it and promptly deleted it. And then added core work to my New Year's resolutions.
By 8:30 we had our littles in bed, and we settled down for a quiet grown-up evening. We were tired enough that we'd have been happy to greet the New Year in the morning, but Luke had other plans. In fact, he finished up his last meal of 2010 just a few minutes before midnight, so we welcomed 2011 at its very start. (I'm not sure that 2011 is going to be the year we get a lot of sleep!)
Happy New Year! (A mere six weeks late!)
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