Chinese New Year Celebrations - By Accident

Thursday afternoon I started to have 'inadequate parent' pains about the Chinese Spring Festival and our lack of any type of celebration concerning it. Being the wonderful parents that we are we decided to take our children to celebrate CNY at.....wait for it......West Edmonton Mall. Yep, we're great aren't we? Really celebrating our children's racial heritage :-).

Well, actually, West Edmonton Mall has a huge Chinese grocery store and they usually have Spring Festival activities such as Lion Dancing, etc. Unfortunately for us the celebrations are taking place on the weekend rather than on the actual 'day' of the new moon.

So we went on some of the rides instead. Jie-Jie loved the carousel. Before it got going he kept rocking back and forth saying, 'ma, ma' (Mandarin for horse). By the way, he says all big, four legged animals are 'ma'. Tonight we were looking at a picture book and he identified a sheep and a cow as 'ma'. Anyway, then we went on the train (Eva's totally fav. ride). He loved that too. Finally we went on the hot air balloons. Loved it too.

After the rides, we went to our favorite Chinese food restaurant 'Noodle-Noodle' for supper (yes, we actually left the mall). Super yummy. To make it all very Spring Festivally, we had sesame balls for dessert. Like I said, we're great parents, but we were about to get really lucky. Around nine o'clock that night, we got a phone call from Mrs. Yan. Mrs. Yan has been trying to cram Mandarin into my teeny tiny brain over the past month or so. She is also the teacher of the Mandarin playgroup Eva and I have been going to. Anyway, she was calling to let us know that there was a Spring Festival party at the Assist Center (where we went to the playgroup) on Saturday and we were signed up for it. Yeehaw. Celebrating our children's racial heritage just fell into our laps!!!!! Does it get any better? Yes! Eva's most favorite person in the world NINA WAS ALSO THERE!

Not only that, get this, while at the party we were invited to Dim Sum tomorrow with a group of parents who have also adopted from China (and maybe some Ethiopia too). Anyway, we got it ALL in one weekend. I love, love, love it. We'll get to spend more time with, and get to know the families of, some of the women I have already met plus maybe meet some new people. I have so missed face time with other adoptive moms.

So, we've gone from doing absolutely nothing about the lunar new year to having a weekend jammed packed with activity. Happy New Year everyone.