Lucky 2013

Dear Ian,

Happy New Year! 

Once again, we've finished off a year and are moving swiftly into another one.  And once again, I am thankful for the fact that I get another year of being your Mommy. 

2012 was an good year for us.  Daddy's work continues to grow and thrive.  You and I started our second year at Advent.  You turned three, I turned 34 and yesterday, Daddy turned 37.  (Technically his birthday occurred in 2013, but it's so close that we'll give it to him.)  We had family adventures and vacations do Disney, Cohocton and a cruise to Mexico and the Western Caribbean.  You gained two new cousins, Nole and Taylor, and we got to celebrate cousins Payton and Abigail's third and first birthdays as well.  You became the proud owner of your pet fish Bubbles, Lollypop and Pumpkin, and you've grown at least two inches.

We survived the Terrible Twos, and we're now headlong into the Trying Threes.  The word "why" dominates your vocabulary, and you are experimenting with pouting, tantrums and "It's not fair."  You and Daddy are cultivating a love of old Star Trek episodes, and you are slowly trading Caillou for a Disney cartoon called Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.  You have discovered a love of basketball, football, well... all sports, and you've become obsessed with playing the War Chant on your Marching Chiefs cd over and over and over again.

It's been amazing to watch you change and grow this year, and I know that time is going to go warp speed as we start the 2013 race.  So to make sure that we went 2012 out in style, we had ourselves our own little family New Year's Eve party.

Taking down Christmas decorations always makes me a little sad.  All that festive fun and revelry, packed back up into boxes.  Sigh.  So this year, I stole a Pinterest idea and only took down the ornaments from our tree.  Then I replaced them with balloons, crazy 2013 glasses and party horns.  Voila.  We had a New Year's tree!  Daddy wasn't the biggest fan of it, but I liked it, and I think you liked it, too. 

Now that our decorations were up, it was time to move on to the food.  I made party meatballs, and keeping with Davis family weird food traditions, I picked up a shrimp cocktail platter.  I dunno... it's one of those things.  My family has done it forever, so now I do it.  Either way, I love shrimpies, so it worked for me.  Anyhoo.  I picked up a bottle of champagne for me and Daddy, and for you, I got a bottle of ginger ale.  You don't normally drink soda, but I figured that New Year's was a special occasion, and that it would be fun for you to drink something that sort of looked like the champagne that Daddy and I were going to share.  You even got to drink it out of a wine glass, see?

Incidentally, you are very into "clinking" at every meal.  Your little toasts are so cute.  You say something like, "I'm thinking of Daddy" or "I want to clink to my fish."  Love it. 

After our little party dinner, it was time to boogie.  Daddy put on Juke Box Hero, your favorite song, and we danced around the living room blowing our party horns.  It was a lot of fun.  Then you played DJ and chose songs like Old Mc Donald and such from your CD collection.  Never before had I ever heard those songs played at a New Year's Eve party, but it worked for you.

 Then we all got our horns, counted down from 10 and yelled, "Happy New Year!"  The horn blowing was a little obnoxious, but it was fun.  And it was 8:15pm.  Hey, you can't tell time yet, so I need to use it to my advantage.  One of these days you will actually want to stay up until midnight, so this Mommy is going to get all the rest she can out of your current limitation of not being able to tell time. 

It was the perfect start to our new year: just us, having fun.  And I loved it.  One of these days, I am going to sit down and think about resolutions for 2013, but right now, I am just taking our fresh start day by day and loving every minute.

Just like I love you,
Mommy