Haley planned her last VLB meeting of the year for New Year’s Eve. We all met at the church at 8 PM for some pizza and games. It was a really fun night! The kids were a lot more animated and engaging than normal.

We started with a couple rounds of Apples to Apples. Look at that smile! He’s usually the hardest one to get to play games.

These three crack me up. Nathan is always appalled that they don’t know as much about history as he does. He does a lot of head shaking at them. And they just roll their eyes at him. :-)

After they finished off the chocolate chip cookies and we were all just talking Austin decided he wanted to see some of the boys in a push-up contest. Of course none of them would have it if he wasn’t going to be involved.

Here’s what happened…

Brayden was the first to give out. He’d been bragging about how he could do push-ups because he was in football. Nathan and Austin kept going long after Brayden gave out.

I think Austin did just one or two more than Nathan and then he collapsed. :-)

They were all really good sports. And all the onlookers got a kick out of it!

Next we split up into smaller groups and played games.
LIFE the card game.

Uno

And BLINK. Ha! Robert had a terrible time with this one. I kept telling him to pretend the cards were boxes. He made it through peak-season with FedEx a few weeks ago and did well with the quick movements there. Guess maybe he’s shut down now that things have slowed back down. :-)

Then all at once it was 11:45. What? How’d that happen? Haley rounded everybody up and encouraged us to pray for ourselves, each other and the local church for the coming year. We had a good time of prayer that lasted shortly into the new year.

Haley then passed out poppers and we had our own countdown…a few minutes after the new year started. These pictures crack me up…you can’t actually see the poppers exploding. You can only tell by the junk on the floor.

We got home around 12:45, but I was wide awake until after 2, I think. There was no stirring in the house until after 9 the next morning. Zeke wasn’t feeling well so he spent the day on the couch. We were seriously in need of food so I went grocery shopping. Then we spent the rest of the day just hanging out. Great way to start the new year. Even better was the next day when we got back to school and some semblance of a routine. :-)