Happy New Year, everyone!

We had our annual boring New Year’s Eve, with a twist. Although we stayed in, M had five friends over for the evening. As we were banishing them to the basement for the evening, S and I cleared out our liquor cabinet and beer fridge down there. It’s the first time we’ve ever done something like that. Although we were reasonably sure the items contained in each would not have been disturbed by M and her friends, we wanted to prevent anyone making a bad choice. We didn’t say a word to M about it, other than pointing out that we had stocked the fridge with soft drinks for her and her friends to enjoy.

I heard from two other friends who had to make similar adjustments within their homes as their kids hosted people for New Year’s. Parenthood is fun.

C went to a friend’s house for the night. Which left L stuck with us and M’s crew. She didn’t really mind. We played some Madden. At one point in the evening she was watching videos on her iPad, S was watching a TV show on her laptop, and I was watching a movie on my iPad. We were the perfect representation of the modern, connected family I guess. It made me chuckle.

Normally New Year’s Day is when we take all the Christmas decorations down. A couple of the girls whined about the short holiday season and asked if we could keep everything up. We decided to put off taking the indoor decorations down until the weekend but we did take advantage of the fairly warm day to get all the outside lights taken down and stored away.

I watched a fair amount of football yesterday. The Rose Bowl was sure entertaining.

The only bummer of the New Year is that M and I are fighting colds. She’s coughing like a 60-year smoker. The cold is all in my head and I feel like my ears are stuffed with cotton. I’ve taken long naps each of the past three days, which sounds fun, but they’ve been the kind of naps where you wake up feeling worse than you did when you fell asleep. Better this week than last, I guess.

I hope all you of you had happy and safe New Year’s celebrations as well.