new years eve

Happy New Year! We originally were going to go over to a friends house for games the first part of the evening. However late afternoon Brielle was down for a nap at my parents house and I talked Matt and my mother to go to Costco with me. (I have to back up real quick. Matt and I have been talking about upgrading our mattress to a king. Matt mentioned that Costco were selling mattresses and then my mom mention they had a really nice sleigh bed for a good price. I wanted to go check it out, so we did). Originally we were going to just get the king mattress and maybe the sleigh bed. Then it turned into well if we are talking about getting the sleigh bed then we should get new nightstands because the ones we had were light colored wood and the sleigh bed was a dark colored wood. I think we stayed at Costco too long because by the end of our visit we ended up buying the entire bedroom set and new mattress. I WISH I had my camera because we were quite the sight pushing all this through the store and loading it all into 2 different trucks. Of course we had to go to our house and unload everything before we could go back to my parents.


So much of the furniture was really heavy. Thanks dad for your help!


That darn corner makes it pretty tricky to get big items upstairs.


They are strong and smart boys, they were able to figure it out


I am sure my dad is thinking, "How did I get suckered into this?"


We packed the bedroom room and the hallway, loft and downstairs were boxes. There were A LOT of boxes.

Needless to say we spent WAY too long at Costco and then started dinner late. We decided to order 'Take Out' from Outback. My parents went and picked it up and when they brought it back we discovered they didn't pack my Aunt Lynn's dinner (which was a side of potatoes). My mom called and they refunded our dinner and were sending a letter to apologize=score for us! But by the time we were done with dinner it was almost time for Brielle to go down for bed. We ended up having to cancel with our friends and then had to decide wither or not we were going to go home or put Brielle down at my parents. We did decide to stay because Derek and Miyuki were in town and thought it would be nice to spend more time with them. We really enjoyed our visit. I wasn't feeling to well so I didn't push to play any games. However we did pull out some noisy toys to ring in the New Year with Brielle before putting her down.

Brielle can get some really wild hair when she pulls her rubber band out of her hair.

Brielle adores Grandpa Hicks. It's really cure, she just laughs and laughs.

Grandpa gave Brielle his camera which she thought was pretty neat stuff. She carried it around with her and wanted to flip through all the pictures. We eventually had to take it away because she was pushing to many buttons and we didn't want her to screw things up.

Derek, Miyuki, and Brielle

My mom had a box full of poppers to ring in the New Year. Some of them were REALLY loud and other produced a lot of smoke. The following pics are fun facial expressions while setting of the different poppers

Both Matt and Brielle were a little afraid how loud this popper was going to be.

Brielle thought the show was pretty fun.

Lucky did not like the noise of the poppers and ran away shaking.

She wanted to play too.

But her idea of playing was throwing them out of the box. Check out her right hand.

Right before my Dad put his Chinese hat on her, can't you tell she just love it??

Goodnight. My mom likes putting her down when we are over at the house.

It was quite the party let me tell you. It was like 10:30 and we were all dying. We weren't sure if we were going to make it to midnight.

Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar??

Matt's ready for the count down

Dad can't believe he made it. He is oh so tired!

HAPPY NEW YEAR. We toasted a few minutes early so we could go outside and celebrate.

Hurray get all the goodies.

Matt became a little rebellious and thought it would be a good idea to lit off some of Derek's illegal fireworks. Hope we don't get caught.

Ok so there is a funny story to the fireworks. Derek had just shared his firework experience he just had in Utah. He almost got in a lot of trouble (a hefty fine and/or 6 months in jail). But the cop was nice and told them to put the fireworks away. So tonight they had just decided to light a few off and were ready to head out the door when my dad walked in from outside and said, "there was just a cop driving up the driveway, shining his flood lights up the road." At first we thought he was joking but he said he was dead serious. It made us a little uneasy but we went for it anyway....no guts no glory....right?

Oh the fun!

I LOVE Matt's facial expression.

I can't believe I actually captured the firework. We did have a scary moment. I don't know if the one was pushed too far into the snow or what happen but it shot off the side instead of up. But we were successful and setting off some without getting into trouble.

Look at our mess. We sure did have fun! We were able to watch part of the Downtown firework display as well.

Our baby was a trooper and was wondering why we woke her up.