Happy New Year!

Tradition is that the kids, with their cousins, spend New Year's Eve and New Year's Day at my parent's house with my parents ringing in the new year. They started this when the youngest, my son, was only about age three. They love their Cousin's New Year's Celebration and have helped plan the festivities throughout the years. You can see what they've done by checking my archive list.

My dad proposed to my mom fifty years ago on this exact day, New Years Eve. They will be celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary on August 20, 2011. What a brilliant year this will be for them, and how thankful I am that their marriage has stayed true and strong for fifty years!

To celebrate their engagement anniversary, my parents decided to travel with the kids and treat them to a room at a fantastic indoor water park this New Year's Eve. Having organized it with us-parent's during the summer, they finally surprised the grandchildren at our Christmas gathering earlier this month.

So that not one grandchild would know the surprise before the rest of the kids (by having a card to read, or a scavenger hunt to follow, or something along those lines), my parent's made up a very cute tape recorded message (remember those?!) to play announcing their New Year's Eve plans.

Although they were in s-h-o-c-k!!!, the screams were priceless. For the last two weeks I have been hearing nothing but talk about their New Year's Eve Travels.

We returned from our couple of days in the mountains just last night (blog post to come), washed clothes, reorganized, and repacked for today's departure. They all met at our house, and ventured off by Noon. I wish I remembered to snap a photo!!!!!

The house is quiet. No more chatter, anticipation, and excitement building up for this moment.

So my favorite man in my life and I are going to be leaving soon to start our celebration of the New Year. A date. We are excited about our day and evening and day tomorrow just being us - but we haven't booked the theme song onto our phones, or are texting each other nonstop about our date, or using a daily countdown system like the kids have been. We're more sophisticated than that ... (insert smirk).

HAPPY NEW YEAR'S 2011 - WISHING YOU HEALTH AND JOY IN THE NEW YEAR!!!!