What are you doin’ New Year’s Eve…

Hello all!  I thought I’d sneak in one last post in here before 2012 rolls around.  We’re back from our travels.  It feels good to be home, although I feel a massive purge of toys coming on as I look around our cramped house.  Santa was good to us all!  And despite my fears over Mr. B’s gift, wouldn’t you know it, that boy LOVED it.  Not at first, mind you.  It was kind of quickly discarded after it was opened.  But then, we I started to put it together.  I even went so far as to Elmer Glue that thing together, because I’ll be damned if I spend hours of my life assembling this massive police station for Godzilla Miss P to come over and pick it apart brick by brick.  I do want to emphasize the word hours though.  It took about four of them.  And I have the achy lower back from bending over to read directions and glue tiny plastic pieces together to prove it.  Once it was fully operational, Mr. B went nuts over it.  I have to admit, it’s pretty cool.  Lots of little nooks and crannies for the mini-figures to play in, lots of fun things for the crooks to achieve mischief.  And Miss P had a great score too, getting lots of “beautiful” dolls, tiny animals, dress-up clothes, and all-around girlie gifts that make me throw up in my mouth just a little bit.  But I’m staying strong, for her.  My girlie girl.

And as quickly as Christmas came, it went.  Now we’re staring down the end of the year, and Mr. B is determined to stay up until midnight tomorrow.  He’s FIVE AND A HALF.  A good 75% of me wants to see him do it.  But the other 25%? The percent of me that knows what a let-down midnight on New Years Eve can feel like?  That part wants us all to be in bed by 11pm.  We shall see.  I believe the plan is to have some good friends and their kids over again.  We’ve done it the past couple of years, so it feels like tradition.  And this year marks the last. 

As we get closer to this monumental move, I keep feeling like time is slipping away.  This past Halloween, as we took the kids down to our favorite street festival, I had a moment where I thought “Wow, this will be the last Halloween we’re here.”  And this kind of check-marking keeps hitting me with every major holiday that comes our way now.  Thanksgiving was mild, but still tinged with bittersweet nostalgia.  This Christmas?  Man, it hit me hard.  Not a day went by where I didn’t think things like “This is the last year we’ll have our stockings on this mantle…this is the last year I have to try not to break my neck hanging lights on this gutter…this is the last year I’ll have to ship mass quantities of gifts to relatives all over the country…this is the last year I’ll have to fly for Christmas.”  My mind keeps trying to take as many mental photos as I can, but honestly, I feel like I’m running out of memory space.  Do they make 1G memory cards for brains?