Happy New Year!

We rang in the New Year with a low-key celebration at Ben & Carrie's. They are the ultimate hosts, providing great food, drinks, music and games. Oh, and they're pretty fun to hang out with as well. (My internal grammar police just blew a whistle and wants me to rewrite that as "...they're pretty fun with whom to hang out" or something equally unwieldy. I'm going to ignore it.)

I was very impressed with Carrie's assortment of serving dishes. It's almost like she's a grown-up or something. When we entertain at our house, our version of serving dishes usually includes paper plates, bowls of chips, and a platter of steaks fresh off the grill. Or cardboard pizza delivery boxes. (Notice that my grammar police isn't as bothered by sentence fragments as it is by ending sentences with a preposition.)

Anyway, back to New Year's Eve. We socialized with Ben, Carrie, Angie, Luke, Kaleen and Mark while the kids (Peyton, Shelby and Addie) played with the dogs. Cha Cha was not very enamored with Cowboy, so we had to keep them separated -- Cha Cha & Kiki in one place, Cowboy & Baxter in another. Luckily, the humans got along much better.

After dinner and dessert, Kaleen and Mark had to take the girls home as it was several hours past their bedtime. The rest of us sat down for a rousing game of "Apples to Apples". We watched the fireworks over the Space Needle at midnight, finished up our game (Ben won), and headed home for some much-needed sleep.

It was a very nice New Year's Eve -- much less hectic and crazy than the past few years have been. I really enjoyed it. Does this mean I'm getting old? Or is it OK as long as I'm still staying awake until midnight?