So the past 3 years we have hosted a kid friendly New Year's Eve party. It has always been such a blast and we loved hosting. But this year all our usual attendees were either out of town or moved away. We were so bummed. But one of our favorite families decided to come back before New Years so we decided to get together with them.
I tried really hard to prep the kids. When it got to the middle of the afternoon I told them if they took a nap they could stay up really late playing with friends and could eat lots of cookies. I could see Parker's face light up as I talked to him about the party. Then he responded with,
"Mom, can I bring something to snuggle?"
You bet buddy!
So we went for a little drive and apparently bribing them with the party and cookies was perfect because they fell asleep so fast! It was probably because they had something to snuggle. This picture totally melts my heart.
After our naps we were ready for fun!
Our party this year started at 5:00.
What can I say, we know how to party. HAHA!
We ate Pizza
Played Games
The kids watched a movie
The adults played more games
And then we celebrated (NYC time)
Bubbly, party hats & even little horns.
The kids loved it!
Then we cleaned up, came home and the kids went right to sleep.
Jeff and I stayed up a bit longer cleaning and preping for the following day.
We crawled into bed about 11:30 and despite our best efforts to stay up fell asleep somewhere between 11:50 and Midnight. Go figure. Every other night we are up until about 1:00 am but on New Years we crashed. O-well. Maybe our bodies were trying to start a resolution for us...
We had an AWESOME New Year's Breakfast! Kneader's French toast thanks to our best buds that visited from Utah. They brought us a loaf of the bread as well as their amazing syrup. I looked up a copy cat recipe and gave it a go. Seriously amazing! We were just missing the strawberries, but other than that is was delish!! Thank you Danny and Janneke!! You totally started our New Year out perfectly.
On New Years Day we had a hard time deciding what to do. All new knew was that we wanted to have one last fun family day before Jeff had to go back to work. We decided on a "Tour De Parks" if you will. I remembered taking the kids to some awesome parks in the next town over and thought they would love to go to them again. So we loaded up and headed out.
The first park had this awesome little cement race car track so we brought some race cars to play with. Parker played there THE ENTIRE TIME. Not even joking. Me and Em had a blast together on some of the other stuff though. And Riley had her first go on the swing with me.
After and hour or two we decided to head to the next park just a couple of miles away. I seriously think this is one of the coolest parks ever. A great park for climbing, exploring, and adventure. At first P was scared of this monster slide but I went with him the first couple of time and then he realized how much fun it was. By the end he was going down head first and even convinced daddy to do it! There was even a little hiking trail so we went on a short hike. We didn't make it too far because it was getting cold and we were hungry. So we turned around and called up the grandparents to see if they wanted to join us for an early dinner.
We just went to Chilies, we cant resist their child and salsa. :) Then we headed to my folks and let the kids watch a movie while we played games.
Anyway, it was an awesome fun family filled day just like I was hoping for. I think we made the most of our time with Daddy before the start of busy season. But we sure are looking forward to having him back!
Happy New Year!
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