Each year on New Year’s Eve, we celebrate by having an (almost) fondue. I say (almost) because we tried the real thing with meats, sharp pointy metal skewers and a live fire. Between fine motor skills and general greediness, we decided that we should change how we “fondue”! 

Now, we make a delicious spread of various fruits, cheeses and meats. Accompanying this deliciousness are little individual cups of chocolate, yogurt and other dipping opportunities. Individual. Because we double dip. And we use fingers. And some of us have been caught on occasion picking our noses. So…individual is the way to go.

This year, we really upped the ante. Crab Legs. Oh sweet mercy, crab legs. We’ve created three little shellfish-loving monsters and despite fine motor skill limitations amongst a few of them, these kids can handle their crab legs quite well! And they work for that food happily!

In our spread we had Monterey Jack cheese, cantaloupe pieces, raspberries, strawberries, grapes, marshmallows, chocolate sauce, sparkling apple cider or chocolate milk for drink and…bright red, hot and steamed Alaskan crab leg clusters. Steamed in our beautiful, black speckled steamer pot. 

Oh we were in heaven that evening. We each had seafood hand cracker tools and the vinyl table cloth that covered the table knew going in that its purpose would be fulfilled that night. Out of this bountiful celebration, an unofficial official “who can pull out the most intact crab meat from a leg” competition began and these kids honed their craft quickly!

Such a fun annual event to look forward to on the eve of turning the page into a new year. This year, we recognized something that we want to work on for the betterment of ourselves and our family. We are cutting out the majority of Social Media in that it has been way too accessible for too long. So it’s not a forever goodbye, but a significant reduction in how often we look, comment, like or aimlessly scroll down the news feed. 

Something we have begun to notice is that for how much information we post and how much information we read about other people, we have lost the ability to interact genuinely with others. I suspect that the same holds true for other people as well. We already know everything that’s going on with each other, there’s no real need to talk about it. Plus, we think we have everyone figured out so we end up putting everyone into little silos of “people we agree with” and “people who are wrong”. 

So…we are pushing away from the social Media table. Which is an odd thing to say, given that we blog. But I have always said that the first purpose of this blog was to be a documentation of our family primarily for our children. And others have followed along for the entertainment, commiseration, or a combination of both, which is perfectly fine. 

So far it feels good to be untethered from my phone. Social media is gone from it now. And it’s been eye-opening already to see how often I reach for my phone to check social media without even realizing it. 

We’ll see how this goes…maybe we’ll fall off the wagon but maybe not. Maybe we’ll be able to realign ourselves to how we used to be before social media came along. Maybe we’ll be more in the moments of our family’s lives. And maybe we’ll have time for more personal and interactive things without the distraction of the phone.

It’s not a New Year’s resolution…hopefully we can hang on to this idea for longer than we generally hang on to New Year’s resolution. We’ll see…wish us luck!

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