Feliz Ano Novo

Happy 2010. For the past 30 years, we have celebrated New Year's Eve with a great bunch of friends from high school. There is a core group of about 12 people that are always there and the party moves from house to house each New Year's. No matter what, the celebration involves a lot of eating, shots and college football games and leftovers the next day. The guys always play this dumb drinking card game after midnight called "Horse Thief." Somebody usually throws up.

We started first at a parent's house, then had wild trashcan parties at our college apartments, moved to restaurants and discovered they were too expensive, journeyed through the "new Mommy years" where someone was always pregnant and staying awake was no problem because a baby was always up. During recent celebrations, the kids played poker and neighbors joined in the fun and the parties had gotten pretty wild again.

Our friend Karl is a wine salesman. He has a life size Dick Clark New Year's poster from one of his suppliers and every year we take photos in front of it. Those photos are a great way to chronicle how much we've all changed.

Since we are 5,000 miles away, we missed the party last night and were feeling a little blue. We felt like we were really missing something. I think the only other time we missed it was when we were in Japan. While the fireworks were going off in Sao Paulo and it was still three hours before New Years in Michigan, we called Rick and Lori's house to wish them all a Happy New Year. There were only six people there. All the babies are now in high school or college and wanted to do their own thing. A few of our friends had to stay back to make sure the kids got home safe. Heavy sigh.

We'll be be back for next year's party. I guess it will be time to transition to another kind of celebration again. Hannah suggested that now the kids will have the wild parties and we can go out for a quiet dinner and stop by the wild party for the midnight celebration. NO WAY!! We're not giving up the ship that easy.