Out With a Bang

This morning started out with me trying to explain New Years to a four year old.

Me: This is New Year's Eve. That mean that today is the last day of the whole year.

Olivia, looking worried: Does that mean that we are all going to heaven tomorrow?


We were planning a Metcalf Top 10 list for 2009, but after racking our brains, we could only come up with a few things that seemed worth mentioning. Sure, Alisa's graduation from high school was a landmark event, and we had a great camping trip, and wrecking the Suburban would make the top of the list of stupid things that happened, but all in all, it was a happily uneventful year for us. All of the important things are mostly unchanged, and that is good.

So, instead of sitting around thinking about stuff like lists, we spent the last day of 2009 having a ridiculously hilarious time sledding at the park. The ridiculous part was getting ready to go. The amount of time and effort it takes to get this family out the door for an afternoon sledding trip ought to be enough to get us all ready to summit Everest. By the time we dug around finding snowpants, boots, hats, gloves, snow tubes, the pump to blow up the tubes, I had just about decided it was not worth the effort.

But it turned out to be so worth it. It also turns out Olivia LOVES sledding, and is pretty fearless, Duncan got in on plenty of sledding action, and Will and Audrey don't even require sleds. They go pretty fast just on their snowpants.

Now, for New Years Eve, we are cooking hamburgers and homemade fries, playing games and staying inside. We bought a New Year's Eve party kit from Lee's today, and we have brownies with peppermint ice cream planned for later. Between that and Jenga with Olivia (her latest obsession), what could be better?