New Year’s Eve!

We went to the Vandenberge’s for dinner last night!

The little girls are not as good about having their picture made.  :)  Lisa had just wiped Emma’s face.

Lisa made quesadillas.  They were a huge hit with everyone!

I had mine open-faced (which probably technically does not make it a quesadilla, but I’m not up on all the technical terms).  The grown-ups had lots of veggies on ours.  Yummo!

After dinner Anton and his girlfriend brought over sparklers for the kids!

I think I needed about 20 more minutes to figure out the settings on the camera to get the pictures I wanted.  Alas, neither the sparklers nor the children lasted that long.  :)  We’ll have to do them again!!

I did not get any decent shots of James, but he thought those sparklers were THE BEST!!  He kept saying “another sparkler.”

I didn’t really get any good ones of Natalie either.

There were too many kiddos doing the same thing at once to photograph them all!

Joanna is just easiest to take pictures of these days, so they’re mostly of her.

And on the last round of sparklers, I finally worked out what to tell my camera to do.  And I stood still enough to do it.  {Low ISO, wide aperture, slooooow shutter speed.} 

But then it was over. 

But that’s okay; I still actually had fun even if I didn’t quite capture it. 

Next time we do sparklers I want to pull out my tripod and let the kids try to write their names in the air with the sparklers… one at a time.  :)

We went back inside and watched Vandenberge home movies!  I think Anton was looking for specific things, and Tony had been going through the old videos – had to show the girlfriend!  {Joanna made an appearance in one as a baby.}  It was a lovely way to spend the evening – thanks friends!

We went home and got the kids in bed at a pretty normal time.  And thankfully, they slept through all the madness. 

Happy New Year everyone!