New Year's Eve Countdown Balloons

Each year on New Year's Eve, we have a little party with our family at home.  There's no way I'd rather bring in the New Year than with my very favorite people in the whole world and we have fun planning some yummy food, activities to do, and seeing which kids will make it up until midnight.  On one of my daily scrolls through Pinterest, I found this idea for New Year's Countdown Balloons and thought the kids would really get a kick out of it.

I used a couple of the ideas from the blog post, but then came up with some of our own as well.  Here's our list of what we did;

1. Play a card game.
2. Put on a Glee CD and have a dance party!
3. Pick out a piece of candy.
4. Have a sword fight with Daddy.
5. Pick up main level...THEN...buy Fruit Ninja for Kinnect!
6. Have a thumb war.
7. Have a Popsicle AFTER you finish dinner.
8. Read a book in front of the fireplace.
9. Get in your coziest jammies.
10. Share some of your favorite memories from 2011.
11. Share some goals for 2012.
12. Toast with Kid Wine, then run outside with your noisemakers and yell "Happy New Year!"

I had the kids pick up their bedroom the morning of New Year's Eve and, while they were doing that, I blew up the balloons and hung them.

They noticed them immediately when they came down and were excited about seeing what kind of activity was in each one.  For the rest of the day, it was a constant countdown to the next hour.  The 3 year old asked every 5 minutes if it was time for another balloon yet.

Most of the activities were a hit!  Surprisingly, the 6 year old (not going to lie, I did type 5 at first, so not used to him being 6 yet!) was not happy with #8 but, after a couple of minutes of pouting on his own, decided to join us.

Surprisingly again, they were all excited about #9.  May have been because just before that they noticed it was FINALLY snowing and, with their dad, all went out for an impromptu snowball fight and came back in wet and freezing.  Cozy pj's probably sounded pretty darn good right about then.

~Happy New Year 2012~

The 9 year old said that he think this should do this every year and make it a tradition and the 6 year old has decided he wants me to do the same thing on his birthday next year too.  It was a great, fun, easy, cheap activity to do and everyone enjoyed it.  It will become an annual tradition at our house.

25 Days of Christmas Books

So this is actually an activity that we've been doing for a few days but it's been so fun that I wanted to post about it. The idea is to take 25 Christmas books that you already own and wrap them up as a kind of Christmas countdown. Your child unwraps one book every day and you read it together, all the way up to Christmas.

After collecting most of our Christmas or winter themed books, I put them in the order I wanted them opened and wrapped them up, writing the number of each on on the front. I started out with the winter themed ones first, moving into Christmas stories like The Grinch, Merry Christmas Stinky Face, etc., and had the last books be the more religious, Christ centered ones the closer we got to Christmas. Our last book, to be opened on Christmas Eve, will be The Christmas Story.

This has been a HUGE hit! My boys have had so much fun with it and ask every night to open their book. Being as I have 3 small children, and wasn't about to wrap 75 books, we just put the book in the middle of them, count to 3, and they all tear into it. They love having a present to open every night, even if it is something they already own, they love the surprise of what book it is, and they love reading it together under the lights of the tree.

I put all of our books in a Christmas basket but with a toddler in the house it's just not feasible to leave it out, they'd all be ripped into by the first day, so the basket is kept up high and brought down when it's time to open a book. Once a book is opened, it goes under the tree for us to read whenever we want. An added bonus to this, is that it's spared me from reading How the Grinch Stole Christmas 587 times already like I have in previous years. ; )

This afternoon I brought down the basket to take a picture for this post and my 3 year old, who I didn't even think was paying any attention to me, jumped up from his activity and excitedly ran over to the basket-proof of what a hit this is!

So far, we're loving this activity and I think it will become a yearly tradition in our home!