Chinese New Year 2012

January 23rd was the "official" Chinese New Year day. We had to celebrate. Anytime there is a reason to celebrate a holiday, I am all over it. : ) So this year our family celebrated by going to a Chinese restaurant in Mankato on Saturday, the 21st. We stuffed ourselves with some excellent food. Did I mention it was buffet style. Oh and did I also mention that this Chinese buffet had one section of American food and yep.....my kids were all over that section of the buffet line. Oh well,  at least there was something for everyone to enjoy. Here is the best part of this day: As we walked into the restaurant I noticed a poster advertising The Mankato Chinese Culture Institute and thought it sounded interesting. There were no more flyers left in the pocket of the poster but there was a website. When we sat down at our table and I waited for my turn at the buffet line, I looked up the website. This little place has a Chinese language school for kids, a cooking class for adults, and Martial Arts classes. That was neat in itself, but as I was looking at the website I noticed a familiar face on one of the pictures. I had to look closer. Sure enough, it was a picture of a doctor I work with on Fridays at the hospital. I found out he and his wife are the directors of this little institute. He and his wife are from Taiwan and they speak Mandarin Chinese and have one daughter that they have taught Mandarin also. They started this language school so that their daughter could have more interaction with other Chinese children and learn the language. How awesome is that! Of course I have had multiple conversations with Dr. Li about China, the history, the current government, things to see over there, the culture, etc. He has been a wealth of knowledge for me as I learn about China and the culture. So very neat how certain people are placed in our lives at certain times.

At the China Buffet eating pizza and onion rings : )

Mmmmm, this was my plate of goodness!

Knowing that this place exists so close to us, it will be nice to be able to bring Lucy there just to be with other kids that she can get to know. The class is only on Saturday mornings for 2 hours. I am not expecting her to be able to pick up the language easily, especially since we do not speak it, nor do I know if I could ever learn such a complicated language, but I think allowing her to know about her culture and where she came from will be important as she grows up. Since we have taken classes on how to handle cultural diversity in a family when adopting internationally, my eyes have been opened to the importance of being honest and open with the child about where she came from and how to answer questions that will come up in the future. This place in Mankato will be a great place to start that with Lucy.

On Monday, January 23rd, our kids woke up in the morning to little red bags (red envelopes) with money in them.  In China, families give the kids red envelopes with money in them with the thinking that it will give them wealth in the New Year.

There are all kinds of customs they do to prepare for the New Year like clean their houses thoroughly, from top to bottom, with the thinking that they are cleaning out all the bad luck from the past year. (Oops, I didn't get to the cleaning part of the celebrating. : )) People get fresh haircuts for the new year. Families travel to the place where they grew up for family gatherings with, what sounds like, a lot of food. There are parades with dragons and lanterns. They shoot off fireworks. There are so many different ways they celebrate and for different reasons. I started thinking, "do the people in China even know why they do some of these traditional activities for the New Year? Or are they just doing what was passed down to them, like we do here?" Why did we ever start watching a ball fall for our New Year? What is with the kiss at the strike of midnight for our New Year? Anyway, a lot of the traditional activities of the Chinese New Year revolves around legends and luck and wealth.

The celebration on Monday did not end with red envelopes. I made Chinese dumplings for Ian and Aiden's class and I read the legend of the Chinese Zodiac Calendar and how each animal came to be a part of calendar. You can read the story I read here. Ian wanted to help with the story, so he drew pictures of each animal. He handed out a circle with a different animal on it to his classmates. As I read the story, the student would bring their picture up. The end product looked like this:

You can see that he colored in the dragon because, he said, this is the year of the dragon so it needed to be in color. : ) After I read the story, Ian and Aiden's teacher asked how they could pray for Lucy and our adoption. I mentioned my requests and a student raised his hand so he could pray. It was such a sweet prayer including a prayer for the people of China to know who Jesus is.

We continued celebrating at home with reading books and eating some more Chinese food. Then we went outside to light our sparklers. Well, it turns out that I bought a whole bunch of "punks" instead of sparklers. That was kind of a bummer. We ended up just going through our stash of leftover fire crackers and the boys had fun blowing up fire crackers. About a week before all this we did light some sparklers outside and I ended up getting some pictures.

One of our new books about the Chinese New Year

It was a fun time of celebrating Lucy's culture and I see such excitement in Ian and Aiden now that they have been studying China in school. I hope this is preparing them for having Lucy in our family.
Here are some other drawings Ian has been working on lately. I was absolutely shocked when I saw that he had copied this from a book we have. It is the numbers 1 - 76 in Chinese. Much better than I could do.

We still have more celebrating to do. This Saturday our family was invited to a Chinese New Year celebration for families that have adopted from China in Sioux Falls, SD. A friend (more like a daughter of a lady I know from church whom we have connected with over email and the phone) invited us to this. I am excited to meet her in person and other families that have been in the same "waiting period" we are currently in and get their perspective on the adoption process, being on the other side of it. It should be a fun time.

Many have asked if we have heard anymore from China. The answer, unfortunately, is no. We just wait.