We spent New Year’s Eve as promised: eating slow-cooked pulled pork sandwiches, drinking champagne, and watching The Walking Dead marathon.
In the past, I’ve done everything on New Year’s Eve from dancing in a club in Montreal to hosting a house party to sitting on our Times Square-adjacent rooftop listening to the cheering to counting down with a very grumpy face. This year, my plan was actually to skip the whole ball-drop thing entirely, tuck myself into bed, and get up bright and early to jump around with our son…
But never in my experience has a New Year’s Eve passed without some kind of messy disaster. Usually said disaster involves things like red wine on white dresses or even less fun-to-clean presents deposited onto one’s bathroom floor by an excessively celebratory friend; this year, I spent the minutes between 11:34 and 11:56 scrubbing at the full mug of tea that I decided to catapult onto the very pretty wall-to-wall carpet in our bedroom.
Which was…you know…not that much fun, although because (as I never fail to remind you) I am a total genius at stain removal: no stain. Whee. And what that also meant was that at 11:56 I was still up and at ‘em, and so I went on downstairs to watch Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin be awkward (oh, so awkward) in the moments leading up to the countdown, and feel the turn of another year.
And then: guess what? We were up bright and early on New Year’s Day anyway, because babies are nothing if not very cute alarm clocks.
As planned, I transformed dinner into a pulled pork hash, and served it with our traditional oeufs en cocotte.
The day was 99% about PJs and playing (with some ponytails thrown in, just for fun)…
Although it was so gorgeous out that we did make time for a wintry walk in the woods.
The PJs came with us.
And adventures were had.
