A New Year

A New Year

After a few days at home for Reilly and Tyler to run into work for a day or two, fulfilling our callings at church, and stopping in, to see a few friends we returned to the lake to ring in the new year. We, unfortunately, infected my mom with our germs and she got sick with the nasty bug but luckily she was feeling better by New Years Eve. Sorry about that!! After all of the kids got over their G.I. bug we all got nasty colds. Awesome!!

It had snowed while we were gone and the lake had a good inch on top of it. We got out the broom and shovel and got to work clearing off a nice big patch and continued our fun on the frozen water.

The weather was great and we got to enjoy being outside playing yet again. I am loving the weather this winter. I hate being cooped up inside during the winter!! After the sun went down, we headed inside and began a Downton Abbey marathon. My mom had not seen Season 3 and with Season 4 about to start up... we watched the season for the 2nd time. Still good...but so darn sad. So we snacked and watched until it was nearly time to welcome the new year. It was funny to see how interested our two teenagers were in Downton Abbey. They have had no desire to watch any of the episodes but now they are hooked and they have only seen Season 3. After every episode both Reilly and Kameron would yell "Start the next one!!" So funny. Goes to show the universal appeal of Downton. :)

By midnight only me, Ty, Reilly, Kameron, and my mom remained awake. We toasted the New Year and headed outside onto the ice to ring in the new year with the other lake revelers who were lighting fireworks and celebrating. After ransacking our fireworks horde all we had left were some sparklers but they did the trick. So we lit a bunch of sparklers, banged pots and pans, and whooped it up out on the ice.

Then we headed home the next day to enjoy the weekend before everyone headed back to school. We shopped (everyone had gift cards and Christmas money to spend), ate out, binge watched multiple TV shows on Netflix. I don't think I have watched as much TV all year as I did during Christmas Break Pukefest 2013. I watched multiples TV series start to finish and I can officially say that I am so done with TV for awhile.

In other news... I got released from Primary after five years.  I don't know what to do with myself? It was so weird to go to Relief Society again. Why does Primary always get such a bad rap? I think it has been pretty great.

Now onto setting new goals for 2014. This was the subject of our Family Home Evening last night. We opened up our little box and evaluated how we did on our goals that we set last year. Apparently I got the big THUMBS DOWN from all four of my children on my goal of "yelling less". Bummer. We set our new goals and I hope that we will do better this year at accomplishing them. We were about 50-50 on goals for 2013.

As the new year begins I am happy to bid farewell to 2013. It hasn't been our best year. But still we have been richly blessed in so many ways. We are looking forward to a healthy, happy, more prosperous, and "yelling less" year.

Happy New Year!!