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."