Two Thousand Nine

So this is my last post about 2009. It was such a crazy and fantastic year. I remember thinking at the end of 2008 and saying to myself "I wonder if I will be married by this time next year?" ha ha and here I am married to the man of my dreams. (Seriously, when I guy is willing to stay home from church basketball and help you decorate your apartment for four hours, then you know that you have a keeper) :) Anyways... back to the task on hand, when I was trying to come up with a cute and clever way to finish up 2009 all I could think of was listing off all of my highlights of the year. But then I realized that my highlights of the year were already all listed in previous blogs, so then I was back to square 1. So tonight, instead of trying to be cute and clever I am simply just going to tell you what we did on New Years Eve. We will save the creativity for another night.
Here it goes, New Years Eve we were still living with my parents while I worked at Deseret News. I had to work the morning of New Years Eve so that wasn't anything special, but later that afternoon we headed over to Uncle Brent and Aunt Heather's house. This is a tradition for my family and I really enjoy it so I was excited that McKay and I were able to go. For dinner we had every kind of homemade pizza that your heart desired! It was SOOO good! After dinner we started opening up the special "hour" bags. Now let me explain what these "hour" bags are. For every hour on New Years Eve starting at 7:00 and ending at midnight my wonderful aunt Heather puts together an activity/suprise in a big brown paper bag. It is mostly for the kids, but some of them are for the entire family. Still lost? Well here are some examples from this years party. It was a Hawaiian themed party so we made candy leis, had a DDR competition, played the limbo, made skits with props and filmed them, and then ate yummy hawaiian food/candy. Heather did a great job at organizing the whole thing and it really helped the time pass faster. Then right before midnight we pulled out all the noise makers, party hats and balloons, turned on the TV to the channel with the ball dropping and start counting down. Every year feels surreal to me and I always feel like I should feel different right after it changes to a new year, but I don't usually. I don't usually set any New Year's resolutions and so the only thing that really changes is the fact that I now have to remember to put 2010 at the top of my homework assignments. The fact that I don't usually do anything different has never really bugged me until this year. I mean 2009 will always stand out to me as a perfect year. From now on my life will be thought of in my brain as either before I got married or after I got married. But what about 2010? I want to be able to look back 10 years from now and be able to say in 2010 I did (fill in the blank with something amazing). So I am going to work on making this year count. I don't know what I am going to do yet, but I will let you know when I do.
Well that is about it, after the ball dropped and we did our cerimonial kisses (first time I got to be a part of that tradition) McKay and I packed up and headed home. Everyone else slept over at their house, but we were going to go to Evanston the next day so we decided to go home so we could be ready for that. It was a great New Year's eve and I am glad that we got to continue with traditions, they are something that I truely love about family time. Oh and here are some pictures from our first New Years Eve together. Thanks again for reading my blog and good night!