Rebecca posts about our Chinese New Year party

Thank you, Rebecca, for sharing your photos that you took at the Chinese New Year party at our house! When we have parties, I'm always so busy trying to be a good hostess (making sure that everyone has someone interesting to talk to and something good to eat) that I never end up with any pictures. I think I need to start designiating a person at my parties as a photographer. Lucky for me, Rebecca had her camera out and snapped some great pics.

We invited some family and friends out for dinner at the local Chinese buffet. The owner Susan is originally from Hong Kong and she's so great to us. She tries to teach us a few words in Mandarin every time we see her. She's extra picky with pronounciation, and wants to make sure that we don't say "hair" when we're trying to say "cat." All sounds like *mow* to me. I asked a first grader what he liked best to eat at the restaurant, and he PULLED A CRAB CLAW OUT OF HIS POCKET! Oh my gosh! I was so surprised that he was going to take that home with him. He said, "Look at this. It pinches!" Visions of doing laundry and finding a crab claw in the bottom of the washing machine ran through my head.

Anyway... after dinner we went back to our house for snacks, games, crafts for the kids, and a sky lantern launch. I had oranges on the tables to symbolize money, Chinese candies such as these pictured that contained red bean, and Chinese almond cookies.

My favorite craft at the party were the Chinese New Year street scene that one can decorate with stickers. Rebecca has great pictures of the kids decorating these on her blog. I also had magic scratch dragons where you scratch black off in a design to reveal multicolored paper below. Looks like Oriental Trading discontinued these, but they have lots of other fun CNY stuff if you search under keywords "Chinese" and "dragon."

I had purchased three dozen sky lanters on eBay with hopes to release these into the night sky. Unfortunately, the weather didn't coorporate as it was 6F and the wind gusted up to 25MPH. Here are two videos of sky lanters being released. Below are videos sky lanterns. Well, we'll have to host another party and hope for calm skies!

Our decorations came from different places. The dragons the stretch across the ceiling are from Oriental Trading. The red battery operated lanters are from World Market. The white lanterns with flowers are electric and have been hanging in our kitchen since last year's Chinese New Year party. We like them so much we decided to keep them up, at least until Hannah Claire comes home. You can find electric lanterns like this all over online. I bought these at Target last year. They had lanterns like this in stock this week at Target in the garden section with other kinds of ourdoor lighting strands. World Market has a lot of large lanterns in stock right now in lots of colors.

I was most excited about giving out red envelopes to children. I found Kello Kitty red envelopes on eBay that were printed in Taiwan, and had them shipped to us. Kevin went to to the bank and got $2 bills to put in the envelopes. We read that you were only supposed to give even numbered amounts, and not $4 because the number four sounds like the word death. Well, I'm embarrassed to write that we were so busy doing crafts, playing games on the Wii, and having a great time that WE FORGOT TO HAND OUT THE RED ENVELOPE GIFTS. I feel horrible! I'm mailing envelopes to the kids with thank you notes for coming to our party. They all made it such a fun time.

P.S. Rebecca has some of the most well behaved children I've never met.