New Year’s Eve 2013 | Calm and Chaos: Life with kids

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.