Our children saw in the New Year

The last time I saw the New Year in was five years ago and my youngest was not yet crawling. It took me days and days to recover from that excess. With my kids five years older, the opportunity came our way to celebrate New Years with our missionary colleagues and we decided to try again. 

Because our eldest still talks about that night five years ago and the countdown, it has taken on epic proportions in our family-lore. There was no way that any of them were going to miss out on staying up till midnight.

We packed up and drove to the other side of the city to our mission's headquarters and settled in for a night of food and fun with 40 others. We ate a shared meal, played a couple of family-orientated games, shared the Lord's supper and then broke up to play board games (or whatever - I cross-stitched) until about quarter to twelve. At which time we spent a bit of time praying for one another and then counted down. 

I was surprised, the time went faster than I'd anticipated. Here is someone who never managed to stay up till midnight in her final year at uni in order to fulfil her lock the doors of the college (dorm) responsibilities. I always had to go to bed and set the alarm to do it! I think that in my "old" age I am becoming more of an evening person than a morning person. I have no idea why, but it just seems that way.

The photo is of one of the games. We were in small groups and given a Bible story to portray in a "freeze". We had just a few props or potential props. Can you guess our story? By the way, in the photo are 3/5ths of our family!

The game the our boys enjoyed most of all was the Bingo swap. A "white elephant" type game. Though I'm not sure if we have that label in Australia or if it that is an American label. Everyone who wanted to play brought a wrapped present of a certain value and they were pooled. Then the leader called out bingo numbers. When you got a "bingo" you got to select a present from the pile or "steal" one from another person - who then got to go and get another one of their own or "steal" one from someone else. It all got a bit messy, but at the end everyone had something. After it was all over, we opened our presents. A nice object lesson along the don't-judge-a-book-by-its-cover lines!

It was lovely to see the boys participate in the evening with almost no corrections required from us. I was astonished to see our three playing some kind of ping pong game that also involved jan-ken-poi (Japanese for rock-paper-scissors) - it must have been about 10.30 or 11 and they were happily playing together. Most astonishing.

We did have some fairly grumpy kids yesterday, but that is to be expected. I haven't felt bad at all, I guess it must have been the sleep-in: after midnight we retired to our rooms at the next-door mission guest home and I slept till 10.45. A very rare event indeed.