Monday, February 15, 2010

What happens...

...when Valentine's Day and Chinese New Year fall on the same day? You get together with some of your China travel mates and have a little party! Many thanks to the B family for hosting the Jiangxi families for an awesome Chinese lunch and reunion. Here's our somewhat regular attempt to recreate the red couch photo from China (no, we didn't line them up in the same order...), with the big sisters standing behind them:


Now, can you figure out which girl today matches which baby in this photo, taken on the 2nd floor red couch at the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou?


And here are the four girls from the Suichuan SWI. I don't think we've taken any photos of the four of them together before, but hopefully we'll be able to capture a few more group photos over the the years! We had a tough time with this photo, as their older siblings were standing behind the couch. I asked the big girls to hide behind the couch while we took this photo, and of course, that caused a whole lot of jumping up and down to peek. What was I thinking?


It was a whirlwind week of Valentines parties and CNY parties. And this week isn't much more sane. Sophie and I are off today for President's Day. EJ still had school since we're on winter break next week, and K had to work. Today, I hope to finish gathering paperwork to take to the accountant so the taxes can get done. Tomorrow, EJ and I are going to see the musical at her middle school. Wednesday morning, she has a social studies open house (an Egypt museum) before school, and then a costume check for dance that evening (so I have to alter a few things on her costumes today too!). And oh...somewhere in there, I really need to think about packing since we're heading for PA first thing on Saturday morning for winter break.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Chinese New Year party!

Today was the annual Chinese New Year party for clients and friends of our adoption agency. We had a lot of fun, but it makes for a very long day. Once again, I screwed up the order of selecting the photos (thanks to the lousy interface blogger has for uploading), so we're going in reverse order here.

Here are Sophie and I with the gold and red lion after the lion dance. We got her a lion puppet that matches this lion - a puppet on strings. We'll see how long before it's tangled. I told her that maybe she could take it to preschool on Friday for the little Chinese New Year celebration they're having there.

She also got to bang the drum and the gong:


Here she is inside the lion head for the red/gold lion. They let the kids try them out after the performance, which was great! We'd been reading a story she has about the lion dance all week!


The smaller head fit her much better!

Here's the dragon dance!

Here's Sophie with cutie-pie friend, R:

And here are all the kiddos from our travel group, with the older siblings:

EJ and Sophie hit the dance floor for the Cha-Cha Slide:


On another note, there is an Amtrak train that has been stuck in my hometown of Connellsville, PA for nearly 24 hours in the snow: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/us/07train.html. Poor folks...traveling from Washington DC to Chicago, and stuck (as one of my high school friends put it on Facebook) "in Mayberry."