For the first time since having the children, we spent New Years Eve at home. Normally we find ourselves spending Christmas and New Year racing around the country, visiting Grandparents, friends, Uncles, and Aunts. Not this year.
We wereinvited to parties. Several of them. One party in particular would have been wonderful. In the end, we declined. Ourselves and some good friends who live two streets away sighed at the prospect of another new year racing here, there and everywhere and agreed to do our own thing.
Board games. Retro video games. Chocolate. Nibbles. Alcohol. Fizzy drinks. More board games. More alcohol. And then (after midnight) the Wii dancing and singing games appeared… (I will neither confirm or deny that I had a sing-off with our friend’s eldest, to “The Bare Necessities” from the Jungle Book).
Highlights of the night probably include;
Our youngest cheating hilariously and very craftily at her favourite board game (nobody noticed for ages, and just thought she was really good at it). The Wii retro console downloads letting the grown-ups re-live Super Mario Brothers. Quite how so many of us remembered where the hidden bricks were is anybody’s guess. Seeing 40yr olds hand 13 year old’s their ass at 30 year old platform games was pretty entertaining (the incredulity from the kids that we were so good at the games was priceless). My better half and her best friend singing their socks off to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” on Wii Sing It, fueled by a couple of bottles of wine between them. Umm… yeah… me murdering “The Bare Necessities”.
I remember looking at my watch early in the evening, and thinking “oh, we have hours left” - and then suddenly those hours had just gone, and it was time to turn the TV up, watch the seconds count down in central London, and listen to Big Ben strike the beginning of 2012.
Our youngest nearly missed it all. In the run-up to midnight we were playing a board game. Five minutes before midnight she was awake, sat on her Mum’s lap, eating sweets. At some point in those next five minutes she switched off, and was gone in the way that small children are when they sleep. I think she spent the last moments of 2011, and the first of 2012 wondering where she was, what was going on, and why all these people were in our house.
We completely forgot to open the champagne.