I’m only four days late with this post! New Year’s Eve was a bit different for us this year, but super fun nonetheless! For the past few years we’ve celebrated at the bowling alley with cosmic bowling until the late hour of 7pm. (2010, 2011, 2012) Then home for a fairly regular bedtime. This year, sadly, the bowling alley is closed. They went out of business quite suddenly one day during the summer. I hoped they would reopen by now, because what else do you do with a bowling alley besides reopen it?, but they have not.

This year my parents were also in town, so we decided to have a nice dinner and a family game night.

While I made dinner, Mema and Grandpa Tom kicked off the evening with the kids.

Eve promptly fell asleep! Fortunately she work up later to join us for the rest of the evening.

Apparently I didn’t take any pictures of dinner, but it was lovely and delicious. Zesty skillet ravioli, big salad, fresh bread. Yummy! After dinner we played a rousing game of Jenga for awhile.

Jenga!

Eve likes to pull the tricky ones first. :)

Not surprisingly, she gets a lot of this!

That looks stable.

What’s a party without some dancing in the kitchen?!

My parents decided that they didn’t really want to stay up until midnight, so they went back to Popcube’s house and we continued with the games. Well, with one game. Lex set up an EPIC game of Lego Minotaurus that lasted nearly three hours! I came to the game late (cleaned up dinner first) and still won! Yay me. :)

An EPIC game of Lego Minotaurus!

The game ended around 11:30pm. The kids brushed their teeth and settled on the couch. Alan put on the live coverage from Times Square. We don’t have broadcast TV, but we found a live streaming of it. Unfortunately, we discovered at midnight that they don’t actually show the ball drop! They instead show the clock. I wonder if a network owned the exclusive rights to it or something. The kids were a little disappointed, as were the grownups, but we celebrated anyway.

I didn’t think this would last for the remaining half hour, without both kids drifting off to sleep, so I pulled out one more game!

Final countdown!

Happy New Year!

Our family at 12:00am on January 1st, 2014.

Then went to bed.

Happy 2014! May it be a wonderful one for all.

The kids found a big role of paper and went to work! Lex is making a NASCAR race track on his paper, and Eve wanted a tracing of herself to decorate. We can keep ourselves busy when it’s -10° outside!

We spent the afternoon at Popcube’s house, sledding in his front yard. Not a huge hill, but a big step up from our neighbor’s gentle slope. :)

Eve, head first.

Me and Eve

Important discussions on the hill.

Lex

It’s hard to take good sledding pictures!

Lex and I moved to the bigger side of the hill!

Lovely sky

The hill looks pretty big from this perspective!

I thought this little guy was a rock at first. I bent over to pick it up and it scurried away. I screamed like a girl and jumped out of the way. Such a dumb automatic reaction! The little mouse (vole?) buried it’s head in the snow and probably prayed we’d go away! :)

After sledding we went in to warm up. The kids both took showers and we had dinner (homemade mac & cheese, my fav!!).

Eve read quietly while Grandpa Tom combed her hair.

On the way home we swung by La Salette to look at the lights. This year they have a beautiful display of nativity scenes in the chapel. I overheard someone there saying they were donated by an individual who had collected them over the years. There were hundreds, from all over the world. We spent a lot of time looking at them, though apparently I didn’t take any pictures of them! The lights were beautiful, as usual.

Now we just need a guest!

Someone is ready for Christmas!