Hello 2014!

Happy New Year!  Last year I took quite a long break from the blog and enjoyed archiving our family memories in a Project Life album, but this year I'm back to the world of digital memory keeping and hope to use our family blog as a way to preserve and share the good, bad and ugly of our crazy, beautiful lives.  We just wrapped up a fun 24 hours of ringing in the new year with our good friends, the Buntings and the Psimers.  We've celebrated New Year's Eve with them several times, and after taking last year off it was so good to back at the Buntings for a relaxed evening of fun and friends, complete with a sleepover.  Our kids only see each other about once a year, but they always pick right back up where they left off, and the same goes for us grown ups.  The Buntings' neighbors, the Theinemens, also joined us, and it was the perfect way to welcome 2014.

The kids played games the ENTIRE night...every time you turned around they were playing poker (for Twizzlers!), chess, ping pong, Apples to Apples or whatever else they could come up with.  This year we had three sixth graders, a seventh grader and two eighth graders.  Much to the middle schoolers' chagrin, Sarah no longer considered herself part of the "kids" group, and was happy to hang with the grown ups. 

Card sharks 

Sarah chats up the dads after dinner

Late night (or should I say early morning) Rummikube -
our group's favorite game!

Uh oh...John got pranked in the middle of
the night by Jackson 

Lazy football afternoon 

More games!

The time absolutely flies when we're with this crew.  I loved welcoming the new year with both my family of four and some of our oldest and dearest friends.  Looking forward to a new year of memories!