New Year

Every New Year celebration is changing in our household. Originally, I wanted my kids to stay up past midnight and build some crazy core memories, things that my wife was not a fan of. In hindsight, she was right since it would be a few days of readjusting to the right schedule without a long horizon before school started back up.

As I’ve gotten wiser in my parenting life, I now kick off New Year celebrations at 7pm sharp. We watched select fireworks from around the world, talked about which ones we liked the most, and found a countdown to use so we can do our family cheers with some sparkling juice.

Our 7 year old daughter E and 5 year old son C love his time of year because they think it’s a blast drinking the sparkling juice and watching fireworks. Now, our 1 year old son has also shown his affinity for the celebrations and had no issues asking for more and more sparkling juice (much of it ended up on the ground!). It’s a fun time indeed.

We wrapped up the celebrations and had the kids in bed by their normal bedtime (smart). It was a decently quiet evening compared to other years and I know my wife was also glad about that. We were originally not going to stay up until midnight, but somehow did anyways. After wishing each other a happy new year, we went right to bed at 12:01 (or at least tried to). We don’t always get to do what we want all the time (like stay out all night to ring in the new year), but I wouldn’t have it any other way.