Happy New Year!

I really love ringing in the new year. For the past three years, I've celebrated with just the kids, who for obvious reasons don't stay up that late. In the past I've just had a few special drinks with them talked about the year, and what we want to do with our next one, and then sent them off to bed. I then, having no one around to celebrate with, have also just hit the sack early. This year was such a nice change. Josh's new job insures that he'll have all of the holidays off plus his 3 weeks of vacation, and I'm loving every minute of it. We spent many years working around crazy schedules and not seeing him on major holidays, so I guess it's some sort of rite of passage, but I'm glad to be through it and have my sweet husband home to celebrate this great new year with.

We have so many things to look forward to this year, our movie and book, a new house, and maybe even a puppy if I can talk Josh into it. I love the feeling of new beginnings, it's makes everything seem possible, even for me.

We had a relatively quiet evening with just our family. We "toasted" and "cheered" our Shirley temples, talked about our new years resolutions. (Linc wants to be a nicer big brother, although he's a pretty great one already, but I guess there is always room for improvement, and he also wants to get more exercise playing basketball. Oliver wants to play with more cars be healthy and grow up. I won't bore you with my own resolutions the list is too long, maybe that's why I'm always making the same ones, I'll have to work on that.

We did some dancing, played some games and really just enjoyed some time together, before we sent the kids off to bed. I love not being alone in the evenings anymore, everything just seems right in the world having a normal schedule. New Years day we spent with some great friends, actually Josh's cousin Trevor and his wife Stacey and their son Max. It's been so long since we've been able to spend time with them, and it was so nice. Max has gotten so big, and Linc did such a great job playing with him and being a great buddy. We trashed the kitchen making pelmeni (a tradition from Josh's mission) all day, but it was very yummy, and just fun to be doing some of our most favorite new years traditions again.

So as this new year begins, I couldn't be happier with where were at and look so forward to the exciting things to come in this next year!

Linc spent a good portion of the day working on these little iron craft things, very time consuming, which can be good sometimes for giving parents some time to chat with friends.