Chinese New Year and birthday celebrations

We finally were able to hit a Chinese New Year celebration last weekend at the mall.  The girls had their names translated into Chinese and their faces painted.  Cadence held still so well throughout the painting!  There was an awesome group that came  from out of town to perform the dragon dance.  The kids all waited patiently, but once Cadence caught sight of the very large dragons, she did not want to hang around!  She clung to me like she does when she sees clowns.  Laurel said that the music hurt her stomach.  I, on the other hand, thought it was very cool!

We came home after that to celebrate Brad's birthday.  I'm always astonished to realize that our 40's are just on the horizon.  How the heck did that happen?!  Our parents came for dinner and one of our favorite families joined us for cake (or rather, warm chocolate chip cookies top with ice cream and homemade hot fudge... yum!).  It was a good weekend for celebrations!

Face paint

Waiting for the dance

Brad and his girls!

Birthday kiss from Laurel

"Happy birthday to you!"

Happy Chinese New Year!

Sierra dons the dragon head

Cadence & Zac, both from IM



Cadence & Laurel

Pretty in pink!

It's the Year of the Rabbit (my year!) and we had a few celebrations! We started off the morning by eating fortune cookies. Ironically mine said "Your ability to love will help a child in need". To continue the festivities we met up with some friends at a yummy Chinese restaurant - Ni Hao - for dinner. I coordinated with two different families to meet there and, such a small world, they ended up knowing each other! The food was yummy, company was good, but the kids (ok, my kid!) slightly out of control. Hence, no pictures of the event since I spent most of it juggling Cadence!

The next weekend we met up with Families of the China Moon, based in Richmond, for a celebration. I've emailed and followed blogs of some of these families and watched a few of journey through their adoption on a similar timeline as ours. It was great to meet a few new families, even if I feel like I already know them (oh, the world of blogging!). There was one little boy whose blog I found through the Inner Mongolia yahoo group and a couple months later realized they were only an hour away. There aren't too many adoptions from Inner Mongolia so it's pretty cool to have one so close. Once again, not a whole lot of cooperative for the photo ops, but we managed one or two.

Sierra, Laurel, and Cadence all received books about the holiday and money in a red envelope. Sierra's book is about all of the Chinese holidays, so we are excited to have many new things to learn about & celebrate!