Little Nipper?

So after many months of reading blogs by all kinds of interesting folks most of whom I do not personally know, but wish I did, I have decided to give this blog thing a try.

Why the little nipper you may ask? Well it goes back to my high school days with my longtime best friend T. T and I did everything together. She was my absolute bestest girlfriend. We would spend hours lounging in her hammock or watching the sunset over the strip mall in Tallahassee as we ate our TCBY yogurt-analyzing boys. You know that stage in your life when you spent copious amounts of time trying to figure out if that special someone brushing up against you in the hallway between classes really did love you as much as you loved him. Anyway, we were absolutely crazy about this candy Coffee Nips. It tasted liked coffee, except not the current kind of coffee that I recently gave up, but the kind you would enjoy when you are 14 years old, very sweet with caramel flavoring. We were hooked on their sweet delicious goodness, so our affection for these treats ended up supplying us with nicknames that we bestowed on people we liked. It truly was a compliment to be called nip, nipper, nip-nop, and so on. We were quite the wordsmiths in those days. The nickname was catchy enough that it circled our group of friends until after many months I think we ran it into the ground. Another friend of mine even named the family cat Nipper. It is a word that conjures up fond, fun loving memories for me and so the Little Nipper it is.

Drinking Jenga Anyone?
For the last eight years my husband J. and I have spent ringing in the New Year with our dearest friends A. and T. and this year was no exception. Our first New Years Eve together was the year of the Y2K scare. At that time both of us were not married, but had opted for living in sin, you know the test before you buy philosophy, which I highly recommend. A. cooked a fabulous meal and we consumed large amounts of alcohol while playing the "homemade"drinking Jenga game. This is a simple game that only has two outcomes, you either have to take a drink or give a drink to another player. Want a drinking Jenga game for your home? Simply get a permanent marker and write on each wooden tile "Drink 1", "Drink 2", "Give 1", "Give 2", etc. We still laugh when we think of that night because apparently the all of two rules of the game were confusing to me. Whenever I drew a tile that said "Drink" I kept trying to make someone else drink, instead of taking the drink myself. The pictures from that night are full of lots of goofy grins, red cheeks, and bloodshot eyes. We weren't sure what was going to happen when 2000 rolled around, but A. said if everything fell apart we could always go hole up at her Mom's house across town because she had enough canned goods to get us through the year.

As the years have gone by the locations have changed. We spent three years ringing in the New Year at A.'s cousin's house. These parties were always themed and required a costume. There was the Hawaiian theme which meant donning a swim suit top and grass skirt in December, Vegas night where A. and I dressed up as white tigers (white sweat suits with hand painted black stripes and a sewn on tail compliments of T. who is a super crafty husband) while J. and T. were Siegfried and Roy. This was definitely the most creative costume of the party. And the last year that was more formal, black dresses for us gals and tuxes for the guys. In 2004 when J. and I bought our home we had a group of friends over to our place. Last year we rang in 2006 at another friend of ours home.

This year we decided 2007 should be just the four of us again. Really there were five because R. their super cute two-month-old boy was with us as well. When we got to their house we spent a couple of hours playing cars with B. their almost three year old boy. Then he went to his Grandmothers down the road so we could spend the night and sleep in his bed. We had cheese fondue with bread, celery, and apples for an appetizer. Feasted on King Crab Legs for dinner and had chocolate fondue with cheesecake, apples, and brownies for dessert. We had some tasty wine with dinner and instead of champagne we toasted at midnight with Lindemans Cherry Lambic Beer (delicious).

Things have changed over the last eight years. We are all married, have mortgages, A. and T. have two precious little boys, and we all know how to consume large amounts of alcohol without feeling so shitty the next day, but in other ways it feels just like it did the first year we all hung out. We still get excited when we are together and have to try not to talk over one another, we still congregate around the kitchen, we end up playing some kind of game (last night it was Scene It?, have you played it?) but most importantly we still love to hang out.

Though this year was milder than years in the past, I didn't wake up feeling like a trip to McDonalds was necessary or that I could throw up at any moment.When twelve o'clock rolled around I was holding R. who amazingly stayed up until a few minutes before midnight when he crashed in my arms and didn't wake up while we hollered and toasted at midnight. Though different than in years past, it was also wonderfully the same. We were all together ringing in another year.