New Year's Eve in Greenland

I'm not going to say I feel about New Year's Eve like I feel about Halloween, but it's not my favorite.

I am an early bird, always have been (my mom used to hate it when I went to sleepovers because I was such a hot mess the next day) and it's only getting more pronounced as time passes.

Staying up until midnight seems arbitrary and weird and I know this makes me curmudgeonly and weird.  But still.

Emma had to work the midnight/New Year's show at the theater so she had to leave early anyway so we celebrated New Year's Eve in Greenland (at 8:00 PM).

Instead of watching the ball drop in NYC, we drop our gingerbread houses.  I have to think it's more satisfying.

I went first and here was my target:

I completely missed.

Mark sent his with the house down and it landed perfectly.

Braeden did the same.  Besides having better aim, Mark knew that would work better to have the heavy part go first.

He's smarter than me a lot of the time.

Adam let me try his chalet house too--as Emma told me, "Make the chalet pay."

I missed it too.

I have other talents (for example, I'm the one who swept and vacuumed up afterward).

Emma went to work and the rest of us finished up our Lego set.  I'm also not very good at those Lego sets.  I'm a whiz at separating the pieces and my mind loves to come up with the categories to sort to make them easy to find.  I'm really bad at following the intricate directions.  Too many details and too short of attention span.  Adam kept saying, "Wait, you're getting ahead...you haven't finished step 3 billion here."  (There were a lot of steps.)

I did love the finished product though.  Here is where we added it to the other sets we had from previous years:

The whole thing, which is almost as long as the table, is impressive but we are all delighted by the details:

It's fun for me to hear the kids name everyone and come up with back stories for the people but also watching Mark build with Legos is poetry in motion.  He's logged the 10,000 hours needed to become an expert and he implicitly knows with a quick glance which pieces he needs (and what original set they come from--he'd say, oh, that's a Bionicle piece).

On a scale of me to Mark, mostly everyone else is closer to Mark so we were able to build the set.

I went to bed around 11:00 so the New Year came without me.  I like New Year's Day.  I love the fresh clean slate of a new year.  It feels like a blank notebook and a sharp pencil.

Happy New Year!