For New Years, my family came to stay with us. Our house was like a hotel over the last two weeks of Dec 2009. It was a full house with 6 adults and two kids (4 years old and 2 years old). My mom and dad stayed in our room, while my brother, sister-in-law, nephew and niece stayed in the other bed room. We stayed downstairs on the blow-up mattress.
When the family go to our place, we celebrated Christmas. All of the toys we had purchased and wrapped were finally opened and flung about the house in a most haphazardly way. There was Ben Ten, little stuffed doggies, a talking Woody doll, Transformers and all sorts of things strewn around the living room. I got lots of soccer equipment, a new razor (from my in-laws), "Lie to Me: Season 1", a french press coffee maker, a card shuffler, and other nice things.

My wife got some new ear rings, a table cloth, "Four Christmases", and other nice things.

At least we had power the whole time for New Years. During the day of New Years Eve we went to the Half Moon Bay Brewing Company for lunch and beer samplers. My brother finally got his beer sampler (he had been wanting one since Thanksgiving). We took a walk down to Mavericks surf spot so the kids could walk through the tide pools. My sister-in-law and my niece would squish the sea anemones with there hands to watch the water squirt out. We did our best to wear out the kids so the adults could have fun until the new year. We played many games over the week: gin, Apples-to-Apples and 31. My favorite was game was 31. There was a $10 buy-in and it got down to the wire pitting me against my sister-in-law.

The kids, "little herpes" (a reference for my sister-in-law), wore me out! My niece always wanted to ride on my shoulders. She would say to me, "shoulder." in her cute little voice. I couldn't resist. My nephew was just old enough to want to do everything I was doing, but still young enough to want to do everything his sister was doing.