Happy New Year!

I'm having a little trouble adjusting to the fact that it is now 2011. Probably because I spent New Year's Eve at Monkey Joe's, place that is loud, crowded and contains hundreds of unsupervised children. But MY loud children love it there so every once in a while when I'm up-to-date on my medication and Jupiter aligns with Mars, we go there. So on Friday we went to celebrate Noon Year. At MJ, this basically meant that at 12:10 or so they pulled out a huge wad of bubble wrap and had the kids jump on it. In their socks. It was like listening to bubbles pop with a pillow over your head. This should have been a nice addition to New Year's, but the kids went crazy because it wasn't LOUD enough and a started screaming.
They also had limbo (both girls won a bracelet) and had free face painting and I sprang for soda (we never have soda!) and pizza (we always have pizza!) and then ICEES because I didn't think they'd had enough sugar, and a good time was had by 2/3 of of. Here they are enjoying their lunch:

Lizzie's face painting. In typical Lizzie fashion she waited a LOOOONG time to have it done and then proclaimed to me that it was lame because the face painted couldn't do a star or a reindeer head, so she had to settle for a glittery butterfly.

Hannah went for a rainbow, which in typical Hannah fashion, she loved, but had rubbed half of it off after about 10 minutes:

The rest of New Year's Eve was uneventful. I almost missed midnight though because I took a little nap during the Backstreet Boys and New Kids on the Block's performance. I woke up in time to eat some sour cream and onion dip and drink some water and ring in 2011. New Year's Day we went to Terry's house for brunch, which was tasty as always, but had to leave early because these guys were coming to our church:

These are the Three Kings made famous in the song, "We Three Kings of Orient Are.." They arrived with their trusty llama and gold, frankincense and myrrh and their entourage. They actually marched through a field while the kids were inside the church singing songs. Then someone yelled "The kings are coming" and everyone ran to the back of the church as they came through the field and parking lot. It was kind of cool to see them arriving:

Once in the church the Kings introduced themselves (in their native tongue which sounds like French, Hebrew and maybe French with a not-so-good accent) and told why they were there. Our priest did the gospel reading about the three kings arrival, and then the floor was opened up for questions. It turns out that two of the three kings know how to swim, one of them has 300 camels and 15 castles and one of the others has only one cat. Also in his country it's apparently bad luck to go swimming so no one ever does:

After the Q&A the kids each got up to give the Kings a letter to take to the Baby Jesus, asking for a special gift from him (Hannah asked for a rosary and Lizzie asked for a crucifix for her room -- although I'd be lying if I said those were their first choices of gifts) that is supposed to be delivered to our home (ala Santa Claus) on the Epiphany. Here's Lizzie getting her blessing:

And Hannah getting her blessing when someone mistakenly bumped my arm:

The three kings presented their gifts to the Baby Jesus in the creche in the church and then exited to more singing from the kids. Then all the kids and their parents got to have refreshments in the social hall. Since it was so soon after Terry's brunch the kids and Rob only had a couple of hot dogs, lasagna, cookies, chips and a fried plantain. It really was a nice program and taught the girls one more piece of their religion.