Note to Self

Mark my words: We will never spend another New Year's Eve in our apartment ever, ever again. Amen.

To be fair, we were warned that things would be bad. That it would loud and chaotic and festive. That people would be out in the streets until all hours of the night and that we should be prepared for lots of firecrackers. I guess we should have seen it coming when we were told to lock Josie in an interior room and to pump up the white noise machine in the baby's room. But nothing could have prepared us for the what we experienced last night.

From 5pm to 5am, we were beseiged by what sounded like missile fire outside our apartment. I'm not talking about a little light display here or there and some cutesy sparklers. I mean, real deal explosives that shake the house and fog the windows. The kind that whizz and whirl and shoot straight up in the air for minutes at a time. The kind that make you nervous when they get too close to trees and cars. The kind that make you curse out of sheer shock and awe at the breadth of the display. Ya know, the kind that only professionals should be working with....or 8 year olds, if you are a Berliner. Like, J said , it was like we survived the first night of conflict during the Gulf War.

The same city that prohibit's barbequing on your apartment terrace apparently allows bottle rockets and amateur fireworkers to set off pyrotechnics to their hearts content. I was so fearful that something was going to hit the house that I wavered from hiding under the covers in the darkened bedroom to pacing back and forth to the nursery to make sure the baby was still okay. And I was right to be scared because it is thanks to this same city and these same pyromaniacs that we now have a whole the size of a frizbee in the outer pane of our double paned window. Yes, we, too got to share in the excitement when a errant missile shot into our living room window. Oh, the joys of the holidays!

The one glimmer of cheer that we can attribute to last night was our super baby. Little bugger slept through the whole damn thing.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.