February 9, 2009

FCC Chinese New Year Dinner ³

by Wendy • Catherine Ellen Mei, featured, My Life As It Happens • Tags: Chinese dinner, Chinese food, chinese new year, Chonquing, families with children from China

Our local Families with Children from China group has a Chinese New Year dinner every year.  We have attended for three years now but we were so excited to finally go to the dinner with our daughter in hand.  This was one event I have been looking forward to all year long.  And this year we were lucky enough to have Auntie E come a long from the ride!

We bought Catherine’s dress at a little shop in Chongqing, China.  I loved the colors and blue is a great color on her.  I was disappointed though because it fell apart pretty quickly.  John had to actually do some fast stitching and hot gluing to keep it together.  It did end up having a few seams rip by the end of the night.  Oh well, she got to wear the dress!

At the end of the night the kiddos got to jump on bubble wrap to simulate fire crackers.  Fire crackers are supposed to ward off the evil spirits in the new year.  She didn’t quite understand what was going on but once she saw her friend Sarah do it, she tried to jump on them herself.

One of the highlights of the dinner is the dragon dancing.  Catherine was absolutely infatuated by them and she really showed no fear, even when we got up close to them to feed them their red envelopes (thanks Julie!).

There were also children dancers performing from a local Chinese dance studio.  Catherine was also pretty infatuated with them.  She didn’t want to sit in my lap because she wanted to dance like the girls were dancing.  When one of the girls did a ballet leap, Catherine tried to do jump.  It was too cute!  She will be a dancer…I can tell!

There were a ton of crafts to do and we tried to hold her attention long enough to put a few of them together but she just wasn’t into this year.  She was more interested in running laps around the ball room.  Next year I am wearing tennis shoes instead of heals!

Auntie E had her name written in Chinese Calligraphy.  It was beautiful!

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