The week between Christmas and New Year’s is such a strange time.  Nobody knows what day of the week it is, most of the time you are trying to pull your life back together and the house back together, and restart the year.  We started out that crazy week with the most wonderful activity – going to the temple with Lily and Derek.  There is just something extra special about being in the temple with our kids.

Because the weather was nice, I also took the kids back to the new playground so that I could take advantage of the walking paths.  There is just something revitalizing about exercising out in nature, even if there is a tree full of buzzards staring down at you.  It reminded me of Disney’s cartoon of “The Jungle Book.”

On Monday, I prepped all day for my New Year’s Eve Eve party, and since I wasn’t making dinner, the kids went out to eat on their own to one of their favorite places – Golden Chick.

This is my third year in a row of having this party, and we always do a white elephant exchange – and I always have Kevin come up with something fun to make it more exciting.  This year he introduced the “Wheel of White Elephants,” where you spun the wheel to either spin again, steal, or choose a gift.  Those were the only rules, so as long as you spun it, you could steal anything, and you could steal it right back from someone.  It made it much more interesting.

Somehow, we managed to squeeze 27 people into our small living room (since our larger front room is now taken up with a piano), and we had fun!  I laughed so hard.

There was one gift that was definitely a hot item – a Buc-ees cooler bag, and man the competition for it was fierce, but Penny got it in the end.

At 8:30pm, we toasted fake New Year, which is way better than staying up until midnight.  It was so much fun, and I am so grateful to have so many wonderful friends.

On actual New Year’s Eve, we got down to the business of putting down Christmas.  I think this is the record for how long after Christmas I have kept it up – crazy.  After all the work was done, the kids played the new Legend of Zelda game their dad got for Christmas.

And as for me, I crashed with a terrible migraine.  Unfortunately, I had taken the sheets off of my bed to wash, and so I had to rest on Arthur’s extra bed, but it was fine.  My cold head wrap thing helped a lot.

Later on, we all watched a movie together as a family, and we were all so worn out from the day, that we all went to bed early and forgot to use the horns and poppers I had.  Oh well.  It was fine.

Unfortunately for me (and Derek), I was woken up at midnight to crazy loud fireworks that went off for almost an hour.  Our neighbors across the street were setting them off, and they were so loud that they kept startling me awake as I was drifting back to sleep, which meant my adrenaline was pumping and my heart racing.  I finally fell back to sleep around 2am.  Ahh!  Not how I wanted to start the New Year, but hey, it can only get better from here on out ;).