Happy New Year!

I hope all of you had a fun New Year's Eve and are spending today contemplating the myriad ways you plan to improve yourself in the next twelve months.  (I, for one, have spent today--after going to church, of course--eating leftover ham, reading a book on my new Kindle, and losing a game of Scrabble to Forrest by 8 measly points.  But I hope YOU are contemplating.)

We did have a fun New Year's Eve, though.  It seemed to me that after so many years of muy excellente New Year's parties at our place involving different combinations of Mindy and Pete, Tony and Cindy, Andrew and Andi, Amy and Dave, and various cousins and grandparents, that it would be muy triste (that's "very sad" in Spanish--I looked it up for the sake of parallelism) to let this New Year's go by without a little fun.  So we invited three other couples and their kids and had a really good time eating, playing SingStar (of course!--and even though I'm convinced nobody SingStars like our family, we got the group at our house going and I had to force most of them to stop so we could play Taboo.  Why won't anyone ever play Taboo with me without arm-twisting, I ask you????)

Here are some shots of the fun:

A little Bananagrams action.  A bunch of the teenagers, including Ethan, left at 9:00 to go to the Multi-Stake dance in Minneapolis.  We missed them . . . but I don't think they missed us. :-)

I'm glad to finally be able to use our big center island for a large group and lots of food.

Wyatt and his friend Max singing Pink's "Rock Star."  (Wyatt's version of this song goes like this, and has for months: "So what! / I'm still a Rock Star! / and it's a New Year! / Yes it's a Neeeeww Yeeeeaar!"  His version seemed appropriate for the evening.

Another shot of Wyatt and Max.  They had a ball dressing up like "Injas" (ninjas, you know) and running all over the house.  Wyatt finally crashed a little bit before 11, when our neighbor Steve came downstairs and said he'd tucked Wyatt in bed. :-)

This is Steve.  And his wife Becky.  They live just one street down from us in our neighborhood and have been great friends to us and our kids since we moved in.  A real answer to prayer.  Their cute oldest daughter [I'm not putting names because I don't know how these guys feel about names on blogs, so I'm being safe and conscientious here] is in the chair, unable to go to the dance because she just had surgery on her foot. 

Steve and Becky's son and Jonas, dancing on the front porch in sub-zero temperatures to herald the new year.

And Steve and Becky's OTHER daughter with Elise at the stroke of midnight.  I have a special fondness for this sweet girl because she let Elise sit with her and her friends at lunch from day one of middle school.   

Steve and Becky  have one more child, a boy who's Ethan's age, but both he and Ethan were at the dance at the fateful hour.  (The two of them went skiing at the local resort a few days ago and I was going to take pictures then, but forgot.  Whoopsie!) Forrest went to go pick up the kids from the church, so by the time the kids were picked up and dropped off and home, we didn't get to bed until a little before 2 a.m.! I don't think I've stayed up that late for years and years and the next day I felt it in my bones.  But we had a great time, and it was worth staying up that late because Ethan had a blast at the dance.  I've been so grateful for the really strong youth groups in our ward and for all the opportunities they have to do fun stuff together.

And now it's 2011!  Can you believe it?  I can't.  Man, I'm old.

Finally, here's the promised video of the kids' Christmas skit, written by Ethan and rehearsed by all in about an hour on Christmas Eve day.  The picture quality isn't the greatest (it was kinda dark) but I think you can get the feel of it anyway.  Gotta love those kids of mine.