New Year's Eve / Harris Burning Man

On New Year's Eve we went to see the Secret Life of Walter Mitty, which Jared and I mistakenly thought at least half of the boys would catch the meaning of. Gavin and Jonah noticed and enjoyed the comedic scenes and after a little coaching Liam and Caleb could articulate the value of creating a life worth living, or like one of my favorite verses in the Book of Mormon states: "to act and not to be acted upon." After the movie we came home to a late dinner, and rang in the New Year about 10:30pm with a few spectacular leftover fireworks from the 4th of July. I know, it's early, but always I think starting off the New Year is best with a good night's sleep.

The next morning, Jared woke up early to get a campfire started in the backyard and I made the boys' favorite blueberry muffins with the streusel top. Before venturing outside, we sat down and individually wrote out a few things we each wanted to get rid of and "burn" out of our lives this year - a tradition we started last year with some friends. This time we also illustrated with pictures of ourselves, so we could burn the old self in effigy.  We've named this tradition Burning Man (our own little version of the "Burning Man" festival held in Nevada over Labor Day).  Like Burning Man, we are celebrating, lighting something on fire, leaving something behind, and we are in our own way building a sense of community among the six of us.

Here we are preparing our people....note Caleb's is folded and kept secret, which was his choice, and despite our repeated requests for him to share, he never did. I'm still curious and hope one day he'll open up. The rest of us shared what we were burning which included things like sighing, eye rolling, excluding, or being impatient.

We then made our way outside to stoke the fire and get some good flames going before we burned our old selves in picture form. Jonah kept changing chairs to avoid the smoke, to no avail. In his own words: "smoke follows the pretty one"!

Often when something needs to happen in order we either start with youngest to oldest or oldest to youngest. This day it was oldest to youngest:

Note: the flame thrower in the foreground....one of Jared's favorite gifts to date.

The rest of the day was spent together jumping on the new trampoline, playing board games, and watching more episodes of the 'rebooted' Doctor Who, a British show revamped in 2005 that we got into over the break, making in through all of season one before the boys had to go back to school. Here's to a New Year and the second annual Burning Man.