New Years

New Years Eve is definitely different when you have young children.  We celebrated with Ellie and Chris early in the evening.  We had a year in review scavenger hunt, a craft, ate chocolate pudding (by Christian's request), the Netflix count down, and they were in bed by 8:30.  Brad and I stayed up until midnight with Ivan and watched a movie.  

I printed some pictures of different events throughout 2014 and hid them around the living room.  The kids had fun with the scavenger hunt and also had fun looking at and talking about the pictures after the hunt to remember all the fun things we did last year.  

Brad was lucky enough to have New Years Day off of work, so we took advantage of the opportunity and drove to the coast.   I got the idea from my friend, but I got nervous about cold weather and Ivan. Thankfully, Brad was around.  I am not very good at being spontaneous, so it was good that Brad was there to push us out the door.  If it were up to me, we would have spent the whole day at home wishing that we were doing something exciting.

Here is Ellie getting her warm gear on in style!

Ellie and Christian had fun on the beach with Dad

Ivan spent his first new years day relaxing with mom in the car watching the ocean waves.

We were really spontaneous and braved a restaurant as a family of five.  We went to Mo's, THE seafood restaurant in Newport.  It was a super fun to go to dinner with the whole family, and it was a very family friendly restaurant.  They even got a shark toy presented to them on their straws.