Xin Nian Kuan Le!

Happy Year of the Pig! Yes, this greeting is a bit early, as Chinese New Year officially gets underway on February 18th. Our adoption agency is having its annual Chinese New Year party tomorrow, but we won't be attending this year. We did go last year and had a great time. There's lunch (Chinese food, of course), entertainment by singers, musicians, and dancers, and a wonderful raffle to benefit CAWLI's Rainbow Fund, a charity which donates every single penny collected to helping China's Center for Adoption Affairs find homes for children with correctable medical conditions and to help individual SWI (social welfare institutes, aka orphanages). Our agency consistently donates more than $50,000 each year to these causes. Here is a link to more detailed information.

Here are a few photos from last year's party. It's absolutely enormous - 1800 people (include 700 beautiful children, almost all dressed in their Chinese silk dresses).





K and I will be going to EJ's 2nd grade classroom on Tuesday to do a program on Chinese New Year. We have a book to read and a lantern craft to make with them. We'll show them a map of China and point out the places we'll be visiting. And we're taking oranges with us for snacks (a traditional CNY treat - notice the lion eating them in the photos above). I'll try to post some pictures.

And finally, I picked up these stamps at the post office a week ago. I think I'm going to have to go back for more, since I can stock up and use them for the adoption announcements! Aren't they cool? There is one for each animal in the Chinese zodiac.