Happy New Year!

All the wonderful, crazy, hectic activities of the holiday are now officially over. As a kid, I hated January 1st. It meant back to school and the long, cold winter ahead with nothing to break up the monotony. But not now. After all the wild get-togethers over Christmas, we are glad to be home together in the peace and quiet. I realized I enjoyed the prelude to Christmas even more than the main event. More on that later. Last night (New Year's Eve), we celebrated by playing a great educational board game called "Hail to the Chief"and eating our traditional seafood feast. Once a year Fred brings up the big clam steamer and he cooks clams and crab legs and I make the shrimp and scallops. Then we cuddled up on the couch for a Celtic Thunder concert. For the very first time the girls stayed up until midnight for the famous ball drop in Times Square. But for some reason the station we watched never showed the ball at all! What happened? Did it malfunction? We never heard. Today we took the girls ice skating. I last went out on the ice two years ago when my friend Helen invited us to skate with her family, and I quickly realized how foolish it was for me to participate in that activity. I totally forgot how to ice skate and saw how easily I could fall and break something. So today wonderful Daddy laced up his skates with apprehension but great resolve and took his daughters out. He only fell once--right down on his face and one knee. He said he wanted to lie there on the ice and moan but then he might have caused a pile-up of unskilled children zipping along behind him. (Tonight I see his knee is very swollen and bruised, but his face looks fine!) I froze on the bleachers watching them all while VERY loud rock music throbbed in my brain. But I'm not complaining. My skin and bones are intact tonight and the girls had a marvelous time. Fred is such a sacrificial man. He will deny himself and give anything to bring joy to his daughters. I so admire that quality in him.