Happy New Year!

This is the first year we let our boys (10 and 8) stay up until midnight. I know some of you may think it's lame we didn't let them stay up sooner while others may think they're still too young. We felt like this was a good time for them. They were super excited and we wanted to make it kind of cool for them so we planned lots of yummy food and fun activities. Sally went to bed early and Jon and I played Settlers of Catan (we offered to play with the boys but they wanted to watch a DVD they'd borrowed from Uncle Frankie) while the boys watched Naruto. They snacked on popcorn, soda, and candy. Yum. Both activities finished about the same time and we all played a fun game of Disney Trivia (Shule won). We had played Apples to Apples earlier in the day and had a lot of laughs when the card played by me (the judge) was "adorable" and Jon offhandedly said "Not to be confused with a door bell", a few moments later when everyone had played their card to match the adjective we were all delighted to see that someone had played the card "door bell". I had to choose it as the winner, even though I thought it was obviously Jon's, but no, it was Shule's card! What a crazy coincidence that Shule had that card and Jon had made that weird comment! Too funny!
I digress.
During the Disney trivia game we snacked on little sausages, cheese ball with crackers, and ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery (thanks Mom!). There were about fifteen minutes left of 2008 when we were done with the game so we turned on the tele and busted out the Martinelli's. I went around the house and gathered up all my candles and we placed them all on the coffee table and lit them. We did the ten second count down, blew out all the candles, blew noise makers, toasted with Martinelli's, and Jon and I kissed. I thought it was pretty fun stuff and much more than we'd done last year but the boys still said "that's it?" as we marched them to the bathroom to brush their teeth and get in bed. Life is so like that, things we anticipate are often not as cool as we hoped, but the pleasant flip to that is that the things we dread are often not that bad. So as I look back at the past year and think of the things anticipated and dreaded, I feel hope for the New Year ahead and know things will work out.