Chinese New Year

Xin Nian Kuai Le
新年快乐

Happy Chinese New Year

This is the Year of the Hare - or as Emi calls it: Happy Chinese Bunny Year!

Since the first day was the day after Emi's birthday, we decided to do our celebrating this weekend. We never did get to putting out decorations, but that's okay, what's important is family and spending time together as one. We had such fun making our meal, and it's a memory I will cherish.

Jeff did the fish (turned out amazing), I tossed long, curly (for Emi) noodles into a pot, and Emi and I made the dumplings - both pork AND chocolate! (Any guesses as to Emi's fav?) Egg rolls were planned, but we decided we had more than enough food, especially because Emi thought she also needed peas - so those are on hold. We couldn't find good (or even so-so) wrappers anyway, so while Emi is in school on Tuesday I will zip over to the (tiny) Asian grocery store and pick up the GOOD ones! We think homemade egg rolls for dinner on Tuesday sounds wonderful. I might even pick up more fish!

We had our dinner, a few fireworks (luckily legal year 'round in SC) and Emi received her red envelope containing new dollar bills and chocolate coins. Needless to say, the coins were the big hit. A very nice celebration, and yet another solid start to a new tradition to our household.


Here is a link to our menu (with recipes): Chinese New Year

And now, photos!

Pork Dumplings:

Chocolate Won Tons:

Dinner:

Dessert!

These were fun, pretty easy and worth EVERY moment of prep.
We all liked them, which is unusual for us.

For those interested, here is Wikipedia's take on Chinese New Year.

Chinese New Year Ideas Needed!

I want to ask Emi's teacher if I can bring something in not this week (as they are doing Valentine's Day all week) but the next. So, I have time to pull something together.

The class has eight 2-3 years old's. I need some suggestions for a great book (Dim Sum for Everyone seems a bit too old, same with Bringing in the New Year - both by Grace Lin) but does anyone have My First Chinese New Year (Grace Lin also, love her!) - would you recommend it for this age in a group setting?

I also wanted to bring in an easy food (thinking of making my own fortune cookies - eek! easy?! haha) unless someone else has a better suggestion. Source for maybe some cute lanterns to hang in the class room? Nothing major, I just wanted a couple of things to leave with the teacher to do (they encourage this).

Note: Just found this link via Tonggu Momma's Sunday Linkage! Hmmmm. It doesn't look that hard. Yikes.

Yeah, last minute but things have been a bit crazy around here and while the thought has been banging around in my head awhile it just not finally popped out and said "DO SOMETHING"!

What I'd like to bring in:
1. A book
2. An easy food for snack time
3. Something interesting to hang in the room to talk about
4. Possible: an easy craft (coloring a picture?, something better?)

Remember: I can't stay to present this. At this age they really want us to leave the teacher with a small box and an easy way to present whatever-it-is to the children. That way they have control of the schedule, etc (what I've been told). When she's in the older rooms I can stay and present (except, she is starting a different school this summer that will carry her until kindergarten so I am sure all the 'rules' will be different next year!).

Mid-Autumn Moon Festival

If anyone is looking for ideas for this weekend's Moon Festival, Tonggu Momma has a great post up at Grown in My Heart. Very worth the read.

We probably won't be doing much this year, with the move and still trying to get our feet under us. But we will watch the moon (probably from inside - they grow HUGE mosquitoes here, wow!) and talk about Miss Emi's birthparents with her (age appropriate and attention span leading the way), chat a bit about China and her story (I think it would also be a perfect tie-in to use her lifebook here when talking about her birthparents - that is, if I had it done - yeah, it's on my to do list, really it is). I'd love to attempt chatting about the Moon Festival, but I think we may need to give that another year (or two). Guess we will play that one by year. I wish I had remembered to keep more of our special Chinese celebrations books out of the packing, to bring with us. Specifically, Moonbeams, Dumplings & Dragon Boats. It would have been great to read the chapter in there about the Moon Festival and even attempt the cookies TM talks about. Ah well, next year for sure.

We really need to get a handle on doing something on special Chinese holidays, but there is no way that whatever we do can ever take the place of what her experience would have been had she grown up in China. All we can do is to do our best. And we do, every single day.