Xīn Nián Kuài Lè

Never in my life would I have thought we would be celebrating Chinese New Year.  I take that back, I worked for a Chinese shipping company before having Brannen, and I celebrated the years I was working for them.  Or, I should say "celebrated".  It didn't mean anything to me, I was just in for the Chinese food!  haha.

Last year during Chinese New Year I was annoyed.  Annoyed because  China pretty much shuts down to celebrate their New Year which meant, our adoption process was at a hault while they were celebrating.  We were nearing our travel to China, and the wait that close to our travel just seemed cruel.

This year, we celebrated.  Our little China playgroup got together to celebrate.  I say "little", we are 5 families and each family has one child adopted from China, but total we have 18 kids!  Two of those Chinese kids have recently come home this past year (one of those being Harper), and there is one little boy in China waiting to come home to be with his family sometime this summer.  So, next Chinese New Year, we will have 6 families celebrating!  We are so blessed to have friends that live close who have a China connection.  I'm glad Harper has that.

Ella, Harper, LeiLei, Anna, and Molly. 

Shepherd will be joining us next year.  I'm sure Lei Lei

will be glad to have another boy in the group! 

I'm not sure how big we would have celebrated if it were just our family.  We may have gone out to eat Chinese, but that may have been it.  I don't know a ton about the Chinese New Year, I guess I should now that we have a Chinese daughter, but what I do know is based on symbols, a lot of luck, and each year is represented by some animal.  This year, it's the year of the horse in case you didn't know.

One of the families hosted this years celebration, and we celebrated by eating Chinese food..... from Pei Wei.  Hey, that's my kind of Chinese food!  It's better than some of the authentic stuff we tried while in China.

They also had crafts and a little bit of history of what the New Year is all about.  

We all had bought our daughters silk dresses while we were in China.  They looked SO cute and like little China dolls.

It was a little like herding cats that were on fire trying to get all 5 of them to sit down for a picture together, but we did it.  We had to be fast because it didn't last long!  haha.

 Our first official celebration of the Chinese New Year was a success!  I hope we carry this on from year to year.  Even if we don't really understand it all or celebrate big like they do in China, we still had a ton of fun!

 Harper was in heaven helping sweep up at the

end of the night!