In October of 2007, I hosted a party for this at-home-business called Once Upon a Family. It's a really cool line of products built around building family traditions, creating family values and preserving family history. I got a TON of cool stuff including a couple of things that we use every New Year's Day. The first is a hand print book. It's meant for a single child, but I improvised and use mine for all three. Last year was the first time I did the book. At that time, Brady was only 4 weeks old. This year, everyone had a really fun time making the hand prints and answering all the questions (things like favorite color, favorite food, "sayings", favorite book and favorite music).


Here is the book all set up with the three colors I used last year. Green for Logan, Blue for Aiden and Orange for Brady. When we got started, I asked them which colors they wanted to use and...let's just say that a mom is usually right!

Since this was the day after the big "no-sleep over party", we were all on the mend and really didn't bother too much with the getting-the-kids-dressed thing. Here is Aiden, at around 4:00 in the afternoon...still in "balls jammas" (as he calls them). Blue paint ready!

Here is Logan with his green paint....

...and then his green hand!

Aiden with his blue hand....sort of reminds me of Blue Man Group ;)

Here is Bray in his chair....examining the orange paint bottle.

Now look at his right hand. He wouldn't let me wash it before he was finished with his milk!

The arts and crafts inspired the boys to paint. I brought up some of the paint stuff we had from Aiden's birthday party last year and they went to town for a while.

My friend Kristina lent me (and then gave me) all this cool paint stuff - trays, rollers, dot things that go on your finger, stamps etc.

And here is the final result.

As you know if you read my blog, I can be quite wordy. Look at how I had to type up the answers to the questions (which are supposed to be written on the bottom of the hand print page...albeit only for 1 child and not 3). I folded it and glued one side down on the facing page so it can be opened and read. So cool - I love this book!

So what's the other New Year's Day tradition you ask? (and no mom...it's not eating black eyed peas....they are yucky and hard to find! We did eat black beans, peas and I's out of alphabet soup one year when we couldn't find actual black eyed peas, but I honestly didn't try that hard this year!) Anyway....the other New year's day tradition is to measure the kids on the growth chart. The only problem is that I think the growth chart is hanging incorrectly and Brian needs to readjust it. Soooo...we'll do another post on that as soon as we "motivate to measure"!