Happy Birthday! I mean, New Year.

We had a great, (and picture free, whoops) New Year's Eve. I am the type of parent who says, "Let's have a pretend midnight and put the kids to bed at 9:00 p.m. And then let's go to sleep too." Mike is the type of parent who says, "This is a special occasion; Let them stay up. Come on." I know he is implying that I am lame, but oh well. I admit it, I am totally lame.
But I am also influenced by peer pressure and laziness (two wonderful qualities that I should make New Year's resolutions about), so the girls stayed up really, really late. Kenzie behaved admirably, happy to hang out with Caleb and Kandelyn (whose parents actually put her to bed, aren't they mean? :). She watched a lot of movies, got to put together a cool elephant on a stick (thanks Cristina and Caroline), and read some stories. Mostly I'm not sure what she did, because I was busy schooling everyone in Dance, Dance, Revolution. Yeah, you missed out on my mad skills. Cristina did take me to task a few times (especially on the hard ones) and Jared (my new brother-in-law) beat me a couple times too, but because my self-esteem is low, I'm claiming the title of UNCONTESTED DDR CHAMPION.
Hannah was good until about 10:30ish. Then she pretty much melted down and went to sleep in a rage of tears.
The next morning she slept until 10:00 and Kenzie slept until 11:00. Good thing, because I slept until 9:59.
We had a good time with everyone who came over to Mike's parent's and loved hanging out and catching up with friends and family.

On Friday, we watched the Utes game at Eli's parent's. Yes, we're old enough to have parties at our own houses, but our parent's houses are just so much better equipped. Eli's mom had tons of new toys and Kenzie and Hannah had a blast with Caleb, Leah and little Eli.
There I tried to put Hannah to sleep but she refused, so we had another late night, but after 20 minutes of crying in the dark (Not me, her, because I was pretending she would go to sleep), she was happy to be awake, so I was fine with her not being asleep. Part of my parenting philosophy is, "If you cry too much, you need to go to sleep, immediately. Otherwise, you can probably stay up on special occasions." (Yeah, I just made that up. I do that all the time in parenting, just make things up)

It was a wonderful two weeks of holidays--Mike took some vacation time and got a ton done, and it was really, really nice to have him around a lot. Thanks to him I have a cool exercise bike program set up in the garage, a lock clicker for the car (Hooray, hooray, hooray! Now I can stop swearing (not really bad words, just little ones) when my hands are full and instead just press a little button), and our kitchen is painted.

Now we're just trying to adjust to our regular schedule and put away all the cool stuff we acquired. I can't believe it's 2009.
I should do some sort of year end recap, but here comes that laziness again. Maybe next nap time.
P.S. Curse you Blogger. This post is picture free because of your dumb uploading problems. Not because I neglected to take pictures.