Happy New Year's!

Our Christmas stuff is coming down, so it must be the beginning of a New Year. We are also going through the toys and clothes that we should have gone through before Christmas, but didn't. I suppose that it is better late than never.

Our New Year's was fairly uneventful. I had planned to play games until midnight, and I imagined the kids going to sleep on the floor or on the couch. What happened was that Joel was so cranky that he went to bed around 8pm. Evan stayed up later, and we were playing games, but then he got "punch drunk" and went to bed around 10pm. I was falling asleep on the couch, so we all went to bed before 10:30pm. Are we party animals or what!?!

Joel apparently was having some issues, because he woke up crying a little after we went to bed. Steve got him calmed down and back to bed we went. Then, Joel woke me up at 11:55pm - just in time to ring in the New Year. He cried and I tried to help, and this went on for quite a while. He was complaining about his ear, so I tried to give him medicine. He didn't like that idea very much. I dipped his paci in the medicine, hoping that he would just suck it off, but that only worked once. The second time he looked at the paci and told me to get the medicine off. He finally took the medicine after I told him that if he took it all he could have a sucker. So I went to get "the same kind of sucker that Evan had" earlier, but it was the wrong one. He didn't know that until he looked at it out of the wrapper and started to eat it, so I got to finish that one. I let him get out of bed to pick the right sucker, and once he had it everything was right in his world. He calmed down, ate his sucker and went to sleep. We didn't hear from him again until this morning. When Steve went to check on Joel this morning, he told Steve to go back to the living room. The next time Steve saw Joel he was sitting under the table with a pilfered sucker. The Christmas sucker tree is down and the suckers have been removed from the kitchen/line of sight of the boys.