We celebrated the arrival of the new year with our closest friends. Mainly because I'm overly obsessed with people not being on the streets on New Year's Eve. Plus, Tim was on call for work so we really couldn't go anywhere fun anyway.
Doesn't matter, though. We made our own fun, in the best way we aging parents can.
Here's the story:
Our friends, The Roosters, came to stay with us to celebrate evening. We had spaghetti with meat sauce, cheesy bread, and Red Apple Sangria (Tim was sad because he could only have coffee).
We played a card game we refer to as "White Trash Poker", we played Farkel and we laughed.
Boy, did we ever laugh. We laughed because we learned from our new Official Rules of Farkel, we've been playing wrong for years. And also because we learned we've been spelling the name of the game wrong too. It's not Farkle, it's Farkel.
We mostly laughed at Tim who wanted to test out his new BB gun by shooting at the neighbor across the street's mailbox (A sincere apology goes out to Nate and Crystal for the new dings in their mailbox). I won't even mention who's fence may have a few dings in it too.
The Teenager and a few of his friends hung out outside while The Kid and The Little Roosters played the new XBox 360 in The Teenager's room. When the younger kids got tired of playing XBox, the teenagers moved indoors.
The countdown to midnight literally began with the first yawn from the adults at 9pm.
I remember when I was young, I never understood why my parents weren't more excited on New Year's eve. It was all about being up at midnight when the date changed, watching the ball drop at midnight, kissing your loved ones.
I was thrilled. My parents were asleep. Now I know why.
We watched the clock.
"How many more hours until midnight? Oh gosh. Still 1 hour, 56 minutes and 49 seconds? I don't know if I'll make it."
"Look, only 49 minutes, 2 seconds left." Yawn.
We made it, though. We watched the ball drop. We kissed. We toasted. We listened to people shoot off fireworks.
By 12:10, we were in bed.
Happy New Year to all of you. May it bring you peace and happiness.
