I love January first. I love it every single year.
Sweeping glitter into a pile whilst sipping a mimosa sets me up for the catharsis I will soon experience - making my list of resolutions and updating our financial spreadsheet.
Ahh bliss.
January first offers a clean start - one that is best savored when we've fully and completely whooped it up the previous evening.
In anticipation of said "whooping" I spent an hour on friday looting Party City for hats, noisemakers, horns, balloons and tiaras - color coordinated with plastic table cloths, cups, plates and champagne flutes - for our new year's bash. To attend: me, Ryan, Leighton, Mairin, Luella, Uncle Pete and Auntie Leah.
Leighton was understandably excited when I unloaded the Balloon Time helium kit from the car.
I would have left it outside until it was time to decorate, but I was worried that tank pressure would suffer in the cold (and my sadistic side was clearly in the mood to torture a wee child) so I brought it in.
Lei asked me to blow up the balloons no less than one billion times over the course of the next twenty-four hours.
Once Pete and Leah arrived and we kicked our kid new year into high gear, the inflation began.
We got 45 big balloons out of the deal, and I am happy to report that Leighton didn't let go of them all night. Several popped over the course of the evening's balloon abuse, but by kid midnight 9pm, Lei still had a respectable handful of ribbons to clutch.
We let go of those balloons over and over and over yelling "Happy New Year" as we danced and sang and talked and laughed and spilled our way into 2012.
The exhausted kids went down around 9:45 and for the first night in a long while, both slept for a solid five or six hours without so much as a peep.
The grown-ups (if you could characterize us as such by this point) talked and laughed and drank and spilled on into the wee hours, squeezing every last drop of fun out of 2011.
It was a fabulous end to a fabulous year.
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