New Year's Eve Fun

A few days before New Year's my family came down and spent a couple of days.  The first evening we met at my brother's house in Durham and had a delicious dinner of pulled pork sandwiches.  (Thanks, Lois!!!)  Afterwards we read our traditional new year's predictions.  Every New Year's Eve (or somewhere thereabouts) we make predictions about the new year, and read off the ones from the previous year.  Some are serious, some silly.  Last year I predicted Merry-Grace would change her earrings.  (She's terrified for anyone to mess with them because they are in there so tightly.)  Needless to say, I missed the boat on that one--she recently told me that she'd change them when the earrings fell out on their own.  Not likely to happen. So I predicted again that THIS will be the year she changes them.  We'll see.  Its a fun tradition to see what we "thought" would happen from one year to the next.  That night everyone crashed at our place and we got up the next day to sign the tablecloth.  Another Jarrell family tradition that dates back to Logan's first New Year's, 17 years ago.  We sort of summarize the highlights of our year and then my mom blocks it off, so each year has its own space.  Its fun to reminisce as we read the previous year's entries.  I enjoyed reading from the year I first met Cory at EFY and other entries from when I was younger.  We laughed at Logan's entry when he was just a kid, about loving the Christmas present Cory got for him.  After his glowing review, we all wondered what Cory had gotten him.  He somehow left out that detail.  But whatever it was, it must have been great.  My how we've all changed and grown up!  It's a fun tradition, though.

The afternoon of New Year's Eve, Cory's brother Eric, his wife Sherry, and their two kids came over and hung out with us for a while.  It was really fun, because we don't get to see them and visit as much as we'd like.  We played the wii a bit, visited, and just enjoyed being together.  The kids had fun playing, too.

Here are Ericka, Elise and Merry Grace.  They were a lot easier to pose for a picture than Ian and Julian were.  :)

That night, we all got together at Cory's sister Melissa's house.  We had such yummy finger foods to snack on and when we got there we tried out our new fondue pot and made both chocolate and cheese fondue.  Cory's mom had an unfortunate run-in with the cheese fondue.  She accidentally picked up a slice of lemon, thinking it was a piece of crusty french bread, and dipped it into the cheese.  One good bite quickly told her something wasn't right, but she thought the bread was just disgusting.  Upon further inspection, she realized her mistake and everyone got a good chuckle out of it.

We spent most of the evening gabbing (something we love more than just about anything!), having some wii competitions in which the loser of each game would rotate out and a new player would rotate in as the new challenger, and just lots of fun family time together.

For the first time, almost all the kids stayed awake to see the ball drop on New Year's Eve and got to have some fun with sparklers.  I can't think of a better way to start the New Year off, than with family.

dre