Happy New Year 2014!

Happy New Year!! 

On New Years Eve I put up envelopes on the wall.  Each envelope had a time on it to countdown for the day.  When it was the right time, the kids would open up the envelope and find an activity to do.  The deal was that even if the activity was mundane or not a favorite, we still had to all do it together for at least 30 minutes.  I decided to do this at the last-minute so I didn't make it look cute at all.  Plus, some of the activities were just regular things to play around the house.  Nothing too exciting, but the kids thought it was more exciting because it was in an ENVELOPE!

Here is a list of some of the things we did--

*Work on a puzzle...we got a 1000 piece puzzle to work on together during the break.  Lots of fun!

*Play board games...I had to strategically do this one during an hour when Eulee was napping.  That girl is all about ruining our games these days.

*Watch TV...see, like I said, not all of them were exciting...although the kids were very excited by this one!

*Make anything in the kitchen as long as we have the ingredients...the kids were most excited about this one.  Luckily, they chose things that were easy to make.  I thought they would want to bake something, but they just wanted to make their own smoothies and snow cones.  Phew!

*Play Hide n Seek...this one was lots of fun for all of us.

*Take a silly picture with props...this one was funny, too.  They all went upstairs and chose dress-up items and 'lo and behold, our son was the only one in a skirt and high heels.  B said that I am forbidden from posting those pictures, so this is all I can give you.  Still silly though...

*Make necklaces with cereal. Old-school, right?

And the last one was...Go somewhere fun to celebrate!  The kids thought we were going to Chuck E. Cheese for New Years.  Isn't that just sad??

Well, this year we spent New Years Eve night with our friends AJ and her family.  They have 4 kids, we have 4 kids...it's always a party when we get together!

The kids played together and the parents chatted and ate food.  Then we did sparklers outside.  I was so proud that finally all 3 kids did sparklers!!  Last year only Eli refused to join, but this year he was totally ok with it.  Yay!

Then we watched a countdown from the other side of the globe at 10pm and made lots of noise and showered confetti on the kids.  We used the same confetti we used last year and made a big ol' mess.  It's funny because AJ is not a fan of messes at all, so it was awesome to do that at her house!  But we all helped clean up in the end, so it wasn't SO bad.
I love that in the picture below, B looks like he is the most excited about the confetti!  Ha!  It was difficult to really take pictures since B and I were the ones in charge of showering the confetti...so this is all I got.

We also ate a cupcake clock that I made.  During the day, the kids kept moving the hands of the clock.  It was really cute.  I only made it because I had leftover cupcakes from Eli's birthday party in the freezer.  Lucky find!

We ended up putting the big kids to bed at 11:30pm.  I wanted to let them stay awake another 30 minutes but B was exhausted and nixed the idea.  Plus, they all had dark pinks circles around their eyes, so I knew they were toast.  They didn't put up much of a fight when we put them to bed either.  Maybe next year...

When we did our New Years toast, we all said what our wishes were for 2014.  (I also had us all write them down in our Family Celebration notebook.)  The kids had such cute wishes for this coming year!  Eli wants to learn to whistle, to blow a bubble with bubblegum, to invent whatever he wants to invent (like a flying car), to play soccer, to ride the boat on the Riverwalk, and to drink coffee!

Evie wants to see a shooting a star and to learn to play piano.  How cute!  She's definitely been jamming out on the piano lately.

Elina also wants to learn to blow bubbles with gum and to drink coffee...hmmmm, maybe B and I are consuming too much coffee these days?  She also would like to build a clubhouse in our backyard, learn to make more awesome rubber band bracelets with her loom, and to do spins on her roller skates.

I wished for earlier bedtimes to make for less crankiness and less yelling and more happiness.  I also wished that I could learn to decorate cakes better this year...maybe with a class or something.

B wished for more project completion.  I think he meant to make that wish for 3 years from now.  He definitely jumped the gun on that one.  Ha!

I guess we have lots to do in 2014!