Happy New Year!

We spent New Year's weekend on the coast with BIL and SIL. We had a nice evening playing Dance, Dance Revolution and eating snacks... lots of snacks. For the first time, we let the kids try to stay up to ring in the New Year. We brought out the party hats and noisemakers at 11:00. There was a good solid 15 minutes of party fun (oh, how my idea of a fun party has changed!) and then Cassia took off her tiara and lei, put down her noisemaker and announced that the party was over. We told her that midnight was still another 45 minutes away, but she said she was done and it was time for her to go to bed. Greyson (who had his evening nap from 6:00 to 9:30!) and Cameron both made it to midnight and we all made quite the hullabaloo when the computer counted down those last few nanoseconds. (How 21st Century are we? No Big Apple drop for us; just the glow of a laptop on some random countdown site.) And Cassia slept through it all.

After the long drive home on New Year's Day, Cameron instantly wanted to do his schoolwork. He had borrowed a video game from Uncle D and *had* to try it out asap. First we did science and finished off that Chapter 1 - 4 Review sheet that we started the other day. It always surprises me, the things he remembers and the things he doesn't. He did really good on the one where you have to arrange the animals from the least number of legs to the most, but he struggled with remembering that birds have feathers and fish have scales. Next he did two math exercises. Simple, simple stuff (filling in missing numbers and patterns up to 40) but he is working towards doing it independently, instead of me walking him through every little step. We finished off "schoolwork" by watching the giraffe birth that I linked yesterday. I've seen that little clip a dozen times now and it still makes me smile. Nothing like a new life. :)

The rest of the day was filled with the kids playing with each others toys. Apparently there is a remarkable lure to other people's stuff, especially the baby's. Greyson was too busy trying to crawl to mind though.