Last Day

When Lukas and Jasper were younger, they referred to anything that had happened in the past as having occurred, "last day." A term I believe they derived from a combination of "yesterday" and "last night," that really meant, "once before." And I think it was the last of their baby talk phrases to disappear, which it did sometime in the fifth year. It always made me smile.

Yesterday truly was a last day. The last day of 2008. And since I realized that I hadn't done anything truly crazy in 2008, I tried to pack as much insanity as possible into the final hours of December. It was a bit of a blizzard outside, and none of the roads were being plowed, so I came up with the brilliant idea of taking the kids on an adventurous walk to the coffee shop café half a mile away while the pregnant one was sleeping in. The children were not easily convinced about the sanity of my plan. I proposed that we take the wagon and pretend that it was actually a sleigh and that I was a reindeer (the holiday movies definitely made an impact this year, and even though we don't "do" Santa, we love to watch Santa movies and theorize about all of the different aspects of the Santa myth). Luke and Jaz decided that Zeben would be Santa (rightly so, since he's certainly the most enamoured--"Mine Santa is my friend, Mom"), Luke was Hermie, the wanna-be dentist elf who befriends Rudolph, and Jaz was simply "an elf." Lena woke up just as we were getting bundled and took some pictures of the confident and optimistic departure.




The wagon was our main mode of transportation before the bakfiets arrived, but I think this was only our third time using it since last June. The bakfiets is just so much faster at getting us where we need to go. And, since we moved in August, there isn't much that's in walking distance anymore (before the move, most everything was within a mile of our house). But the wagon was everything to me before the bakfiets; it represented freedom in much the same way that the bike does now. And, at times like this--when there are 4 inches of new snow on the ground and the bakfiets is not leaving the garage--its four all terrain tires still do represent freedom. Or at least the potential for the possibility of freedom.

So we braved the snowstorm and started in the direction of the café, where the promise of hot chocolate awaited us. While the "snow-positive" wagon moved over and through the snow with a surprising similarity to the sleigh it was pretending to be, I did not exactly have all the strength of a magic reindeer. Santa, Hermie and the elf were heavy, and it was slow-going. Before long, Luke and Jaz got bored with the pace and jumped out to run alongside me, which made the whole adventure much more fun for all of us . . . except for Zeben, who did not appreciate being alone in the wagon-sleigh, even though it was now moving three times as quickly. He started asking for Mama (Lena), who he had only briefly gotten to see before being whisked out into the cold, and before long he was crying for Mama. Eventually, after we'd made it about 1/4 mile, I made the unilateral decision to turn the operation around and return the baby to his Mama. Hermie and the elf were only temporarily disappointed, and by the time we made it back to our cozy house, I think we were all pretty relieved (and frozen).

With mission #1 abandoned, all we could do was hope that our second crazy objective of the day would go forward as planned in spite of the snow. Katie and Aaron (with Elijah and Aryeh in tow) were supposed to come over for our second annual New Year's Eve sleepover party. Before any of us had kids, we used to have the most fun spending many evenings together each week, playing games (pinochle, cranium, and SET were the favorites), being jolly and not dealing with the five sons who had not yet been born. But since the arrival of the afore mentioned children (between us we birthed FIVE BOYS in less than 4 years), our time together has taken on a totally different energy. The kids fluctuate between playing well together and fighting well together, and we make huge amounts of food, feed the kids, and clean up just in time for them to be hungry again. Lately we have discovered the joy of plopping all of them on the living room couch in front of a movie and enjoying some real grown-up time, which mostly consists of the four adults sitting on the couch in the kitchen and not making anyone any food.

Left to right: Aryeh, Lukas, Elijah, Zeben and Jasper,
watching "Horton Hears a Who"

Last year we came up with the brilliant idea to have a sleepover on New Year's Eve so that the original four members of our posse could have a chance to party like we used to while all the kids were sleeping. And it worked! Because none of us is living in a house large enough to accomodate two families of co-sleepers, this year we decided to sleep at my mom's house (next door) since my mom was out of town and she has 3 queen size beds. Luckily, by the time our party was scheduled to begin, the roads had been plowed and our friends safely made the journey across town.

It was as if we had rented a cute country inn all for ourselves. We settled in quickly, started a fire and made some dinner for the 5-and-under set (while placing an order for Indian food for rest of us). And when it came time to put the kids to bed (hooray for the 7:00 bedtime!), everyone went to bed pretty quickly with little protest . . . except for Zeben, who could not possibly understand what I was thinking trying to get him to go to sleep at his Nama's house. So I brought him downstairs where he hung out with us until he wasn't cute anymore, and then he finally fell asleep while we played games.

This was the scene when the clock struck 12:00:

Playing SET

what is that red thing on the floor?

Oh, that's just the baby

Sleeping under the coffee table

We had a blast and the evening was not nearly the insane circus that I imagined it could be. We even had visions of one day, you know when we're all rich or when at least one of us has a job, buying a joint vacation home somewhere and being able to have sleepovers all year round. It was the perfect last day of a wonderful year and there's no one else I would have rather spent it with.

Can't wait to see what 2009 has in store for us.