Chinese New Year 2009

Chinese New Year was a fun celebration as usual. Last weekend, we headed to a local Chinese restaurant with other adoptive families from our area. The kids looked beautiful in their special clothing of course. They enjoyed crafts, food, balloons, and running around crazy with their friends. They really are a great looking group of kids, but I don't think we ever got them to all look at the camera at the same time. I mean, they had balloons!! The balloons were much more fun to look at than the cameras!

(My sweet little Sadie has developed a spunky attitude from time to time! Notice her sticking her tongue out in this photo!)

We skipped out on the larger CNY celebration in downtown Birmingham this year. I took Hannah the last two years, and I'm going to try to take them both again next year. It's usually fun, but we just needed a "down time" Saturday today so that's what we did. I did teach a Chinese New Year unit this week to my students at school for the second year. Since Hannah is in kindergarten, I also took one of my lessons on China and the new year and presented it to her class. I shared some of the objects we have from China, Hannah shared some Chinese words she knows (of course, she's learned them all from the T.V. show "Nihao Kai-Lan!), I read a story, and then the kids made dragon puppets. They had a great time and seemed very interested. Hannah smiled and was so excited the whole time. She's in a wonderful class this year with a great teacher and she has such sweet friends in her class.

Hannah's teacher shared with me her journal entry for that day. Hannah drew her family. Over Sadie, she wrote a "3", over herself she wrote a "5", and over me she wrote my age. Then under all that she wrote her sentence. "my fameelee is brown and pinkish." She told her teacher "me and Sadie are brown. Mommy is pinkish". It was too cute!