It's all new

So I had plans to do this really witty post to sum up the year 2012.  It was going to include a picture collage and lots of funny comments.  But now that we are already a whopping two weeks into the new year, I feel like it is too late.  So instead I'll plunge right into what we've been up to in the last weeks in order to keep track of our lives for my benefit.
The kids have spurts of wanting to dress up and then long runs of not really paying attention to the large dress up bin in their room.  On those somewhat manic swings of wanting to dress up it is almost as if they have to cram in all the costumes into that little window of time that they are in the costume mood.  This photo has all sorts of things wrong with it, but it makes me laugh.  It was one of our last crazy moments of 2012.

We rang in the new year at home with Martinelli sparkling cider and a "kid" new year time of about 8pm.  Works well around here since those kiddos will be up at 6:30 the next morning no matter when we put them to bed.  I was not sad to say goodbye to '12, it wasn't a particularly awesome year.  Sure, good things happened, but I'm ready to move forward.

We jumped into January and had our favorite Idaho cousins to visit.  The annual Jared/Mike double birthday party was at our house this year.  The kids got along really well and played spies most of the time.  The adults ignored the older kids and concentrated on how cute Finn is.  He won us over yet again.  I don't think Wendy or I really slept either of the nights thanks to babies who don't want to sleep at night.  That didn't stop the festivities though.  I was a loser at taking pictures of our weekend and only got these two blurry shots as they were leaving in the morning.  Most everyone has bed head.  At least the party was kind of documented.


As I tried to think of something fun to do for Jared's actual birth day I asked for some suggestions.  And the next thing I new, we were doing a Star Wars party for Jared!  Dressing up was part of the party.  Jared was Han Solo, I was Princess Leia, Afton was R2D2, Ben was Luke Skywalker, and Cade was either going to be Yoda or an Ewok (he refused at the last minute to be anything!)
 

The cake was an eerie shade of blue.  The party was pretty brief.  Happy Birthday Jared!  36 is going to be a good year.