Happy Chinese New Year!!

Happy Chinese New Year!  I really feel like I should have done something a bit more awe inspiring for our first year as a multi-cultural family, but, alas, it wasn't in the cards for this year.  I did have it on my calendar, and I had great plans to do something awesome to commemorate the occasion, but it just didn't end up happening.  But, this is only Year One.  I have lots of years to get better and better, and since this year ended up falling a bit flat in the planning at least I can say that our celebrations can only get better.  We've set the bar pretty low. 

In the future I do want to do a bigger celebration so that Minsy can appreciate her Chinese heritage.  I especially want to put together some school presentations so that her classes in school can celebrate with her when the time comes.  But that won't be for a few years at least, so for now we need to celebrate with her as a family.  We did break out one of the traditional Chinese dresses that we bought for her in China.  It is a purple silk dress that looks absolutely beautiful on her.  When she wears the dress and pulls her hair into two little pony tails she really looks like a China doll.  So gorgeous!  Unfortunately for her first celebration of the year of the dragon Minsy has a scratched up face.  Last Monday when the weather was so gorgeous the younger kids were outside flying (or more accurately, trying to fly) kites.  Hyrum was chasing his kite and accidentally ran headlong into Minsy and she went flying down the driveway, ending with a horrible face plant.  It was quite a traumatic event for all involved.  By the end of the evening Minsy looked a lot like Rocky did at the end of Rocky I.  The left side of her face was puffy and totally scraped up.  Her nose was bleeding on both sides.  She was a mess.  Luckily after a couple of days of looking pretty bad she began to heal, and so far (knock on wood) she doesn't appear to have gained any lasting scars.  Still, today she got to celebrate the Chinese New Year with a giant reminder of her accident on her face.  Still, she is beautiful!  She did have a ball today dancing with her big sisters to some kicking jazz piano riffs

The only other thing that we did was not horribly authentic, but we did take the entire family out to eat some Chinese at Chopstix.  It was neat to see all of us using the chopsticks to handle our food.  That is a big change from our pre-China travel days when we would come here to eat.  Hyrum was even convinced that he had devised the perfect way to eat pudding with chopsticks.  Maybe, but it was a bit messy.  The food here just doesn't compare with the stuff we ate in China.  I still liked it, but it isn't quite the same sort of dining experience.  But it is as close as we are going to find in Waynesville.  

So that was our ultra lame Blau Family celebration of Chinese New Year 2012 -- The Year of the Dragon.  We'll do better next year!  

Either way . . . we are super glad to have Minsy in our family this year!  She is a sweetheart!

Katie and Minsy in their Chinese
dresses