Goodbye 2008

I am not very good at traditions. Once I read a book in which the authors talked about the many, many traditions their family had. Including having to find a body of water every year to float one child's birthday cake on. I was so overwhelmed I couldn't even go on reading.

One of the traditions I have been successful in implementing, though, is our New Year's tradition. Every year we make a best/worst of the old year list. We put down newsprint on the table and bring out the markers and read through the calendar from the last year to help us remember what actually happened. Then we all write down our own lists, and usually compile a family best/worst list. Some years this happens on New Year's Day, sometimes not. This year we were busy watching Aragorn and Legolas on New Year's Day, so we did it for Family Night this week.

Here you can see that while the fabulous tripod I got for Christmas (and having finally figured out how to use the timer on my camera) makes it possible for me to be in the picture too, it does not guarantee that every child will be looking at the camera.

Here are some of the highlights of this year's lists.

Jenna was obviously very affected by the frequent (and expen$ive) visits of the squirrel man.

Jared celebrated the Father & Sons outing, getting baptized, and the presidential election. (I thought you could use a little translation help--it took me a few minutes to figure those out!) In his "Bad" list he lamented the fact that "Nin (Cindy Lynn) left us" and that our tree smashed our neighbor's car.

Jason had the typical 16 year old boy's list--complete with friends, girls, dating, and driving.

Rachel didn't produce much of a list. She spent most of her time writing her name with different colors and trying to persuade people to play tic-tac-toe with her. But her bad list did include Cindy Lynn getting married. As you can probably tell, while we are all happy that Cindy Lynn is happily married, we miss her a lot!

Josh was in a fairly non-compliant mood during our activity. He spent most of his time drawing "political cartoons" on every free bit of newsprint and making up a list of good things that he wished would happen to him, and bad things that we are glad haven't happened to him.

Russ's list and my list are not nearly as entertaining as the others, but we both enjoy making them. It's always such a good feeling to me to make a list of the events of the previous year and see how many good things have happened and how blessed we truly are.

And lastly, just in case you wondered: