NYE with me!

 Hello again and welcome to my second ever post!

As you don’t really know me too well yet, and it’s so soon after NYE I thought that you may be interested to hear how I spent my New Years Eve. Well, first you should know that ever since 2008 or so my family has had a tradition of a holding a game night to ring in the new year. In the years before that, we spent them at my Grandparents house, my parents and grandparents playing 500 while my brother and I played with Legos or something of the sort. Some years, we played video games, especially drawn to active (often Wii) games, sometimes we’ve turned our small family celebration into a party, and invited our whole Church to come, and some years we’ve stuck mainly to card and board games. This year was one of the card and board variety, with a splash of video gaming thrown in. I should also note here that I am hardly a lone zebra in my house, as my mother, father, AND brother also have EDS, so sometimes the more active games get set aside due to being too tired, or sore to play them.

As the most pressing arrangement that anyone had that day was baking a few treats, we started our evening at about 6:00, despite knowing that we were in for a quiet evening, my mom and I decided, company or no, we wanted to go into 2019 looking our best, so we dusted off our dresses and pulled our hair out of our eyes. My dad and brother had decided ahead of time that there was no point to dressing up if no one would be there to see them, but when they saw us all dressed up, and glittery, they both headed to their closets saying “Well I don’t wanna look bad next to you!” As my mother and I snickered at their sudden change of heart. When they no longer felt like our “Poor country cousins” we began the task of deciding what to play, with a cupboard FULL of games, this can take a LONG time, but we worked through them fairly quickly, deciding on about five board/card games, with two (less active,) video games set aside in case we decided to play them as well, not that we were too sore to play them, we just couldn’t play them so well in our “finery”.  After a LONG game of Trivial pursuit (Doctor Who addition:) ), it was decided that we should consider eating dinner, so we threw a tray of fries into the oven, and soon enjoyed a “fry bar” loaded down with guacamole, shredded cheese, barbecue sauce, vegan bacon bits, vegan chili, melted cheese, sour cream and onion dip, and chopped peppers.

(Here are SOME of our games, we do have even MORE!)

Needless to say, we were spoilt for choice, but with each of our plates piled high with our personal favorites, we sat down to several rounds of 31 (a card game we recently discovered.) For dessert and general snacking, we had an apple crisp, and a couple dozen peanut butter oatmeal cookies, (a personal favorite.) although only the boys had any room left for those goodies. After I suggested that we play a different game, (instead of reshuffling the deck another time,) we pulled up a Tetris game which we played until we came to another activity change (my brother or I having won every round) now only a few minutes to midnight, we poured some sparkling grape juice into fancy glasses, with cherries and lemon slices for garnish, and turned on a short tv show, which we all love. Ironically as we do celebrate NYE, we have a bad habit of missing midnight by a few minutes, which we continued this year. My brother, snickering badly attracted my attention to the clock, and I announced loudly, “Well we blew it” my dad tried to recover it announcing “Happy New Year!” While the rest of us unceremoniously sipped away at our juice. I watched everyone fall away, starting with my brother, who waited no longer then it took to finish his juice to beat a hasty retreat to his bed, and ending with me, the last man standing, going to bed at only about 1:30 or so, tired due to insomnia.

So there you go, despite our strong beginning we managed to miss the hour, but the truth is, we still had fun, and as I see it that’s the point of celebrating New Years isn’t it? Not champagne, or a large foil ball dropping in New York, not even kissing your crush and claiming that traditional made you do it, but rather celebrating another new start,  another year survived, silently hoping for secret wishes and prayers to be answered this year, and really just having fun with family and friends, in the hopes of doing so much more in the coming year. Or maybe this zebra is getting too philosophical, and dreamy either way I hope this is a good year for you, and that God blesses you in it in a thousand ways you can’t even imagine yet.

Kat