New Year's

The day after Christmas we went to my parents' house, where we had dinner and exchanged gifts. Our tradition is usually to have dinner and go to mass with them on Christmas Eve, but since our kids were in the service at our church this year, we had to change our plans. Our other tradition is have kielbasa for dinner, which we did. My aunt was there visiting from Chicago, and my sister and her family were supposed to come, but unfortunately my niece was sick, and it turned out to be strep throat, which her family spent the rest of the holidays falling victim to one by one, so we were glad they didn't come to my parents and infect the rest of us.

The rest of the week we spent just hanging out. Daryl had promised to take me out to lunch every day, which he did, or at least every day that we didn't have plans. We took the older kids to see King Kong on New Year's Eve afternoon, and then we had pizza at home for dinner and played charades and watched Crocodile Dundee until about 11:45pm when we paused the movie to watch the ball drop and toast with "kid wine" as sparkling grape juice is known at my house.

My kids had the entire week after New Year's Day off from school, and while I loved hanging out with them, the weather was terrible: cloudy and gloomy every day, with no snow and too warm for ice skating on any natural body of water. We did go to an outdoor ice rink one day, and my parents took them to see "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" one day. We also played games, did karaoake, read a lot of books, ate a LOT, and generally relaxed and enjoyed ourselves and one another.