New Year's Eve

New Year's was super low key around here. Just after Christmas Atticus, Milayla and myself got sick. When the weekend rolled around we still weren't doing too great and weren't sure if we were going to have people over. Come Sunday evening, we decided we better have at least a small group of friends over to ring in the New Year. So after a day of taking it pretty easy with the kids (and a little New Year with the kids) we had the Lorenzes over for some games, sparklers and fireworks. 

While Germany isn't quite as fanatical about fireworks as the Netherlands is, there are still quite a bit of fireworks and we enjoyed watching them from the balcony. It was a little chilly out on the balcony without jackets, but the fact that we were ringing in the New Year and it was above zero was a pretty nice feeling. 

Atticus even (reluctantly) let me get him out of bed to watch the fireworks (Milayla had seen some of the earlier folks setting some fireworks off at dinner time and that seemed enough for her - at least this year). You can really see how enthused Atticus was about getting out of bed, the scowl says it all.

The fireworks won him over pretty quickly though.

That's better .

Then it was back to bed and time to bid adeau to the Lorenzes.

 It was a fun evening. I love the feeling of New Year's. While we love goals around here, we try not to call them 'New Year's goals' as we are always making more throughout the year (as we reach our old ones). I, however, am a big fan of choosing one word themes for each year as a nice little reminder. And with all the New Year's hoopla we thought it was a perfect opportunity to start teaching the kids about setting and reaching goals. We kept the goals small, with one week completion dates, so that the kids could keep interest. Milayla is a little young still, but Atticus has certainly caught on quickly. We each have a goal and have posted them with a chart to mark our progress on a wall next to the table so that we can talk about them (how we're progressing, what's hard, what's going well etc.) during meal time. At the end of the week, if we have all been successful, we will build pizzas for dinner. I'm pretty happy with how well it has gone so far; when we tell the kids it's goal time they get pretty excited and grab their needed items. Milayla even runs to the book shelf to get Atticus' writing practice book out. It really has become a family affair to all reach our goals together and I love it. It's a nice time and I hope that we are able to continue to feed that excitement with more goals and progress.

And with the New Year officially off to a running start, I had better run and work on my week goal.


Wishing everyone a very happy New Year filled with love, joy and peace.