Ni-hao! Gung Hay Fat Choy!!!!

Say what?!?!

Hello and Happy New Year!! No I'm not really behind, I do realize that January 1st was over a month ago. But did you realize that the Chinese New Year was just last week? Did you also know that it's traditionally a 15 day long celebration? We are still working on our study of China and having a great time. We have red lanterns hanging in the dining room and we've made our own lanterns. We've tried Chinese foods like chow mein, egg rolls, Chinese pork. Alison tried and liked the crunchy chow mein noodles. So did Ian. We got a video from the library that showed kids cooking Chinese food and even though we didn't follow their recipes, it was fun to watch and learn from them.

Weatherwise the snow just keeps piling up. It is crazy. Dan and I were talking that this is more like the winters we remember from when we were kids. The big snow banks along the driveway and at all the corners. The worst part is that it's been so cold that Alison hasn't been able to go out and try her sled on the snow piles. The sun is actually shining today. It's been a long time since we've seen it. I could never live further north where they have months of no sun at all.

Ian's last molar (for now) finally popped through the other day. It gave him a horrible time. Now we have the eye teeth to go and I'm scared. Seems like those have been really rough for our other baby friends. I hope his pop through without giving him so much pain.

That's about it for now. I'm trying not to go so long between updates.

February Fun!

I can't believe it's February already! We have had some crazy weather around here. First all the snow melted and then we've gotten tons of snow. My friends who are teachers are saying that they've used up all their snow days for the year and are looking at lengthening the school days or going extra days to make up for the time they missed. Makes me glad that we don't have to deal with all that. We've just been staying home a lot. We get a little cabin fever, but we are safe and warm and that's what matters.

Ian is growing and changing by leaps and bounds. He is 18 months old today. We went to his check-up and he weighs 25 pounds! Hard to believe that this is the same kid that we were so worried about not growing.

His new favorite activity is climbing the furniture. I've had to pluck him off the top of the loveseat more than I'd like to admit. Luckily he hasn't fallen off the top yet. He's fallen off the seat part a few times though.

He also likes hats now. Which is good sense he hated them with a passion before. I found this hat in his closet the other day. Nana made it for him usingthe smallest pattern and it is still a little big on him. If I roll it up a bit, it fits though.

Alison decided she wanted to learn about China. She picked a movie at the library and it happened to be an intro to Mandarin Chinese. It got her curious about China. Right now we are waiting for lots of books and movies to come in at the library. We did go to a tiny oriental market. The lady that owns it was really nice. She is Vietnamese though so her store of course she had lots of Vietnamese things. We did buy some odd little cookies. We didn't get pictures of those yet. But they were yummy and Alison actually ate something new! Chinese New Year is Thursday so we are going to make some sort of Chinese food that hopefully she will eat. I figure we can't go wrong with noodles and she likes some veggies. So maybe a nice stirfry. I'll try to update Friday and let you all know how it turned out.