Happy New Year

New Years Eve, what a fun time! Staying up late, playing games, watching movies, snacking, sparklers, grape juice (if you can’t ring in the New Year with Champagne), and fireworks! Who in their right mind wouldn’t love a night filled with all this grandeur? If you’ll remember from last year, Kailyn didn’t even make it past 10:30. This year, however, she made it until 2am! Talk about a trooper…or maybe she just didn’t want to miss anything! When planning for this New Year, we decided Kailyn would be old enough to stay up if she liked. Now, she has NEVER stayed up…or maybe I should say been able to stay up past 11pm. No matter where we are, if it’s getting that late she will usually just pass out! So, we decided to spend this New Year’s with my parents and siblings. We thought that we would start the night off by attending Mass and then making homemade pizza. We got plenty of snacks (most of which me didn’t eat), sparkling grape juice and a few treats for when the clock struck twelve. We also decided that since Tony had just received Guitar Hero III from his dad (THANK YOU SO MUCH) that we would transport out Xbox 360 to my parents house. Since it was going to be a late night anyway, we decided to eat dinner at our own pace and not rush anything. Having said that, it is no surprise that we didn’t eat dinner until 8pm! Just a bit late! Once dinner was cleaned up and the snacks lay out, we thought we would play a few songs from Guitar Hero. Thus it began. Tony started us off, just to show how it was done- actually he just wanted to showoff how AWESOME he is! No really, he is pretty darn good. Before we knew it, we had everyone playing- even my mom. We took turns, each and every person getting their turn to “rock.” My dad managed to try, despite the fact that he is missing a finger and a half on his right hand…it was a little funny to watch (sorry dad). He tried, but his efforts were in vain, he just couldn’t hit the keys! Valiant effort, daddy. As we played on, we had no grasp of time or how quickly it was slipping away. In fact, we might have missed the New Year altogether, if it wasn’t for my dad coming and informing us it was 11:50. Already! We had managed to play for about three hours! Well, it isn’t really that hard to get sucked into the game it is really fun!

Consequently, we gathered our chairs, blankets and sparkling grape juice. Out we headed into the cold and dark night. Let me just quickly insert here that Kailyn was not showing even the faintest bit of sleepiness! As we began to get situated, Kailyn quietly asked, “Umm…what are we doing?” I told her, “It’s New Year’s, baby! Yippie!” Now I am sure the title meant little if anything to her. All she knew was we were having a party and that was enough. She didn’t care for who or for what, she was just happy because it was simply a party. As excited as she was, all that soon went away. As soon as my dad and brothers began the loud barrage of fireworks you became frightened instantly! After I explained to her that if she looked up she could see the pretty shapes and colors, she decided that it would be worth it to endure the noise for the beautiful sight. As it neared midnight, we began to count down 5…4…3…2…1…Happy New Year! We toasted in the New Year and cheered at the still ongoing fireworks. Now at this point in the evening one might say, “Yeah that was fun. Let’s clean up and head home.” No, not us! Back inside we headed to open the little party poppers full of surprises! As we each opened our little party poppers, we got a loud surprise and a few little presents. Guess what Kailyn got…a whistle! For the next thirty minutes you could randomly hear her running about shrieking and blowing her little whistle as loud as she could. This of course was going on while we began to strike up Guitar Hero again! After an hour of that we decided we would pull out the cards and play a few games. A few hands into the game I glanced down at Kailyn sitting in my lap, her head resting on my chest. Slowly and softly her eyes began to shut. At exactly 2:05am she drifted off to sleep. Shortly after that we went home. I had asked Kailyn shortly before she fell asleep if she had fun and if she liked the party. She happily replied, “I love this new party.” (Just in case you were wondering she slept until 12 the next day…way to go sweet girl!)