New Year's Eve 2018

Weeks ago, Brooke and I were looking at our calendars and trying to find a time to get together with our whole families. We both realized we had New Year's Eve free and decided to spend the evening together. And then the more we talked, we realized how much easier and fun it would be if we had a whole family sleepover, and goodness it was SO much fun- one of my favorite nights of our whole Christmas break.

It ended up being even better because OSU's bowl game ended up being the afternoon of New Year's Eve, so we got to watch an OSU game (that they won- rare this season) together to start the fun.

Our kids always play great together especially with a house full of new toys.

We ate dinner after the game, and Katherine gave up on the New Year's Eve fun.

After dinner, we changed the kids into jammies and did some New Year's fun with them. Matt and I played the saran wrap ball game last year at a Christmas party, and ever since I've been wanting to have the kids play it. I thought New Year's Eve would be a fun time to make it happen, so I picked up a lot of little trinkets at the dollar store, and the kids played it before they went to bed.

The big boys knew how it was done, ha! All my kids asked if we could play it again next year, so it might be a new New Year's Eve tradition.

After the game, we gave the kids sparkling grape juice and turned on a couple of New Year's countdowns on Netflix (at 9:00).

Then we attempted to get the six kids in bed which surprisingly went pretty well. The girls went right to sleep after only one visit downstairs by Elisabeth. The boys stayed up talking for awhile (the big boys were up for a long time. They almost made it to midnight, ha!).

The BIG boys were ready for bed too after getting six wild children down for the night, ha!

The main reason we wanted to do a family sleepover was so the adults could play games. So we woke up the men, and played a few games together. Matt and I love playing games, and it's not easy to find uninterrupted time to do that with friends, so we really enjoyed playing games on New Year's Eve- even if I had to keep nudging Matt to keep him awake, ha!

We stayed up for awhile, but couldn't make it until midnight. We watched the ball drop in New York at 11:00 and called it a night.

New Year's morning we cooked breakfast, and then sent the kids upstairs to play and got another game or two in before we had to say goodbye around 11:00.

We had the best time. Our kids are all great friends, and I think it's fun that Brooke and Corey lived with us for a week back when they were moving here, because they are comfortable in our house and they're just like family to us- Matt didn't mind disciplining our kids in front of them, ha! We all decided that this should be a new tradition and are already looking forward to next year.