New New Year's Traditions

For New Year's this year, we kept things low key...yet had a terrific time and discovered some things that we have decided we want to make new traditions out of! Last year, for those of you who choose to remember with us, we spent New Year's Eve 2009 in Zanesville, OH with some Tim Horton's and Chinese food that the front desk person at our Fairfield Inn recommended. We were on our very last leg of our cross-country drive to Washington D.C. to start training in A-100! What a difference a year makes! Wow. I can't believe that was already a year ago! Anyway, it actually was pretty good Chinese, and we decided that it might be fun to go with that idea again and make it a tradition for our life in the Foreign Service. We were going to go out for lunch, but the boys put up a stink and we ended up just doing takeout. It worked out great though, as the boys had plenty of room at home to play with their chopsticks!

"Isn't this what belt loops are for Mom?"

Such a cutie- and L.O.V.E.D. those chopsticks!

Later that night we got together with our terrific friends to use up some of the other holiday goodness (ham from Christmas dinner, pineapple chunks left from our Christmas drink, and an extra pie crust) and whipped up some delicious homemade pizzas! They actually turned out really great and were a lot of fun to make!

Ours had ham, bacon bits (yes, I know-both Pork) and some pineapple! It was SO yummy, and just what I had been craving! It was actually our friends idea, and I'm so glad they came up with it! I think we might do it every year now. It was great.

Porter made one by himself-he loved it, although he preferred to use the "dump and smash" method when it came to applying the cheese! It was pretty funny.

To top off the pizzas we broke out the board games and played a round of Settler's of the Stoneage! It was a good game, although Mr. B took home the W and entered his name in the box top for posterity! Congrats again B.

Seriously, sometimes it doesn't get better than this...too much yummy food, friends, and board games! A great relaxing evening for sure.

Now C is also the fantastic party girl and picked up these terrific hats for the evening! My boys LOVE party hats. It was a dream come true!

The kiddos did amazingly well, we were planning on calling it a night early- but falling asleep to movies seemed to be the order of the night for the littles!

Thus, just us adults made it to the countdown. We watched the countdown on the TV and said Gule Gule to 2010! We also were even then able to see some of the fireworks over the Bosphorus from our window! Welcome 2011!

Porter and Ronan went up to our bed a earlier in the night-Ronan couldn't make it, but surprisingly when we went up Porter was still awake and watching his movie! He loved it, and was proud of himself for staying up until midnight!

Now for New Year's Day we took the boys swimming in the morning (gotta love the indoor heated pool!) which they always love. Then with not too much else specific on the docket for the day we were invited over to our friends for another round of Stoneage AND...

perhaps our new favorite thing about New Year's Day!

So our friend is from the south and they eat Black Eyed Peas every year on New Year's Day for good luck! Now, being that neither one of us are from the south we have not previously done this...or ever even eaten Black Eyed Peas before! They were SOOOO yummy though, and we were both in love. I'm getting her recipe for sure and I think we will be doing this again! If our new home base is going to basically be DC in the future it can almost be considered "the South". So I say we can adopt this tradition.

It worked out well for us as well, being that we definitely need some good luck this year! In 2011 we will be wanting good luck for the birth of our new little one, AND we will be bidding in the fall for our next post! Hopefully the peas will do their job! Happy New Year everyone, and we hope 2011 is a great one for all!