Chinese New Year

This first picture has NOTHING whatsoever to do with Chinese New Year, but instead it shows what my daughter has been doing in all her free time since our snow arrived. (Sadly, as I type this, the snow has all melted.) She would go out and work on shoveling a path for the dogs. This was serious business for her. You can't see her face because she headed out on Saturday before I'd tackled her hair.


We hosted our annual Chinese New Year party yesterday. It is so fun seeing the families each year. This year, we had 2 new families. One new family just submitted their paperwork to China in September. It was fun to chat with them and remember back to the early days of our own adoptions. I hope there is a speed up in the processing or they may have a very long wait ahead of them. The other new family was the Chinese family of Elise's friend. Mary, the mom, is interested in giving the girls Chinese lessons together! WooHoo! Her daughter has no interest but Elise does. She is thinking that if she does lessons together, her daughter might have more interest.

We do the party as a pot luck and everyone brings a dish. That works out GREAT. I do always make a few stir fry dishes. I just love the colors of the veggies as they cook up!

I just had to take this picture. This is Trixie's normal spot anytime I'm working in the kitchen. It's a good thing I'm tall as I end up stretching over her everytime I need something in the cabinets above her or need to use the sink. I think her ploy is to help clean up anything that might fall to the ground.

Elise decided to wear this outfit. I'm not sure how Chinese it is, but we did buy it from a Chinese kiosk at the mall. She loves it, so we went with it.

Elise helped me prepare for the party by "decorating" the house. I found these dolls in our new china hutch. There were stuffed pandas all over the house as well (along with a few Disney princesses!).

I swore I'd take more pictures this year, but ended up enjoying our company. This is the only picture I took. We had these 3 crazy girls, along with 7 boys (and 14 adults). The boys started to outnumber the girls last year. Of the kids, 4 kids were adopted from China and 3 from VietNam. The boys were wild! Several of the littler kids really look up to the bigger kids and had a blast hanging out with the bigger boys for the evening.

In the end, we all ate far too much to eat (but wonderfully delicious food), a little bit to drink (I've discovered Chinese beer gives me one major headache that I'm still nursing!) and so much fun discussion. The kids ate their fill of fortune cookies and Chinese lucky candy and stayed up way past their bedtimes. I see many of these folks throughout the year but I always look forward to getting all together for this celebration. I love the chance for my kids to see families that look like ours.

I hope everyone else had a wonderful Chinese New Year Celebration.