Hello, 2017

Unlike years past, I felt driven to put away all the Christmas decorations before the new year arrived. So on Friday the kids and I worked hard to pack away all the ornaments, ribbon, garland, and other assorted Christmas finery. Bryan carried the boxes down to the basement while Cooper and I shifted furniture and vacuumed and generally made the house look presentable.

Here we are, celebrating a clean house in all our blurry-selfie glory.

On New Year's Eve, because all that work was done, we were able to focus on relaxing. We watched a few movies (Pan, which is weird, and Kubo and the Two Strings, which is lovely and sad and scary and heartbreaking and hopeful), played Spontuneous, a fun game my parents sent us for Christmas, enjoyed some funny YouTube videos, and rang in 2017 with poppers at 10:30PM. That's when two exhausted little girls were put to bed.

The rest of us stayed up until 2017 actually arrived. Peter and Cooper enjoyed playing video games until I insisted they turn it off so we could watch the ball drop. 

After we drank our Martinelli's and wished each other "Happy New Year!" several times, we sent the boys to bed. Poor Cooper was so tired he could barely climb the stairs up to his room. Peter on the other hand claimed he had lots of energy and wanted to keeping partying. We said no.

Here's what was left of the awesome spread Bryan put together for our family party. We snacked all evening on crackers and veggies and various appetizers. He said he had happy memories of spending New Year's Eve as a kid eating similar feasts, so he wanted to recreate it for our brood.

 

It was a nice, low-key way to close out one year and welcome another.