New Year's in Chicago

After spending Christmas and the week after in Ohio, we traveled back to Chicago in time for New Year's Eve and the last few days before Charlie's busy season at work starts.  New Year's always gives us a chance to look back on the year - and 2012 was a good year for the Mowry household - as we now have one more member!  This was Brady's first New Year's Eve - though we didn't expect him to see the ball drop - bed time is around 8:30 :)

We went to the suburbs.  Brady's friend Tessa was there (our friend Kris and Tina's parents' house), and some other friends of theirs were doing the New Years thing out there - kids included.  Charlie's old roommate Jay and his wife and son were out there as well.  This was our first time meeting baby Bob - so they had a stare down!

Then each decided the other baby was all right!

Kris and Tina ordered food from Maggiano's and Jay made some very potent jungle juice and Charlie made root beer floats with a vodka twist for some of the adults and virgin for the older kids.  Baby Tessa went to bed around 7:30pm, Brady went to bed around 9pm and Baby Bob I think held the record and stayed up till 10 or so (after taking a nap of course).

After all the babies went to bed, we played some good old fashioned drinking games.  Back in college, the two games of choice were usually Flip Cup or Beer Pong.....ironically enough it was not until we were all in our 30's that we discovered "Flong", which somebody at the party had played before.    We were all wondering why we never thought of this while in college, because it might possibly be the perfect drinking game....a combination of Beer Pong and Flip Cup.  Here is a quick tutorial, basically we divided into teams similar to flip cup with everyone on each side of the table next to a flip cup, then there are 2 people (one on each side) that go head to head in the beer pong.  Once a ping pong ball is made into one of the cups, it starts the flip cup competition.  And if the team who scored the ball into the cup also wins the flip cup competition, then they get the point for the round, but if the other team wins the flip cup competition then the point is deflected.  Quite a fun game that pretty much can go on for a long time.

While we have been in the central time zone before for New Year's Eve, we had forgotten about how the Times Square ball being dropped doesn't really mean a lot because it happens at 11pm in Central time zone.   But no matter where you are, it is still fun to count down at Midnight and celebrate the New Year with a kiss.

Here's to a very happy and healthy 2013 to all of our friends and family.

 Even Griffey had a date for the night, his new best buddy Kirby.  They were quite the team, chasing each other around all night.