Wednesday, January 9, 2008

New Years Eve and Beyond

New Years Eve has always been my personal favorite holiday (Or at least for the last half of my life). Its more of a symbolic eve than anything else, with a reflection on the past twelve months and hopes and dreams galore for the next twelve and what they have in store for us. As a family, we have historically either had a dinner party at our house or been somewhere else in the world to ring in the New Year in style. Regardless, the Braheem family has always made a pretty big deal of New Years. This year we took a totally different path. As the year drew closer to its end, the planner in me realized “Heck we don’t have any plans for New Years Eve! What the hell are we going to do?” Anna suggested about two weeks prior that we simply lay low and spend it as a family. Frankly this seemed counter intuitive to what the holiday has historically represented, but on the flip side I didn’t see many other choices beside going out to a restaurant and hanging out with a bunch of strangers! We hunkered down at home and made a simple dinner with the kids, followed by a family movie on the couch. We decided to introduce the kids to one of our favorite funny films “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” with Steve Martin and John Candy. When we had the “Travel Day from Hell” on the way to Spain, we told the kids about how we were living our own PT&A (Literally) and they were immediately intrigued to see it ever since. I must say, it turned out to be a really nice and very different New Years Eve. There is something about your kids belly laughing that makes for a great night no matter where you are and what you’re doing!

The following day we packed (Man this turned out to be a much larger project that I would have ever figured!) and had a nice lunch with Anna’s parents. The tradition of watching bowl games all day while nursing and hang over never materialized (I couldn’t name one player on a college football team at this point anyway!) which did make it seem like a bit of a strange New Years Day, but we had lots to do prior to returning to Europe.

On the 2nd of January, we made our way to the airport and checked in nice and early (Yes we learned our lessons from the Spain trip :>) and had a nice long lunch with my mom and dad as well as my sister and niece at the airport before shoving off.

As the plane elevated its way skyward, I glanced out at the out across the Los Angeles skyline with a strange feeling that it will be six months until I see it again…

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