gong xi fa cai!

Or "xin nein kuai le!" or "Guo Nian Hao"... I'm not sure which. According to my two minutes of googling, all of these three phrases mean "Happy New Year". Actually, I think the one used in my title means something about wishing you prosperity, but is a typical Chinese New Year greeting.

Today is the first day of the Chinese Lunar New Year. So, last night we went to two Chinese New Year parties -- had to put those awesome Chinese dresses to good use. The first one we went to was at the home of someone I used to work with. We didn't stay long, but boy I think we could have stayed a week and not wanted for anything to eat. Tanya and her mom made a tonne of food, and it was all great. And the wines. If only I'd had more time to sample them all.

The second party we went to was at the home of one of the other Ottawa couples (Kohji and Tamara) who travelled to China to adopt (daughter Kiyomi) at the same time as we did. There were six families there (unfortunately one of our group couldn't make it) and I think we had food for about twice as many. It seemed that way. Tamara ordered lots of food from a great Chinese restaurant, and it was all fantastic. I took a whole bunch of pictures at the party (for once I remembered my camera), but most of the pictures are of the backs of kids heads. I have a real knack for missing great shots but getting pictures of the split second later when everyone looks in another direction. And although you would think my memory is improving, since this time I at least brought the camera along, I still didn't remember to put it on red-eye reduction setting, so lots of my photos have possessed looking kids in them. :-)

Before everyone left, we put all the kids on the couch for a group shot. Of course, it's almost impossible to get a picture of young kids where everyone is looking towards the camera, and no one is crying. This was the best one that I got. Unfortunatley, not everyone is clearly visible. I think we did well though, getting everyone onto the couch... spacing we'll worry about another year. :-) The little girl in the middle in the overalls has only been home in Canada for a few weeks! She's doing amazingly well.





I'm also putting up this pic of E and A sitting on the life-size lion at the party. They were quite facinated by it and liked climbing on it.




On a final note, I understand that some of you are having trouble commenting on the blog. (I'm chosing to believe that's the reason I get so few comments.) I'm not sure why that is. I put up a test message a few days ago and it worked fine for me. And that's the extent of my troubleshooting. Send me an email if you're still having trouble and I'll try to investigate a bit further. That's it for today. If you want to know more about Chinese New Year, check out the wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_New_Year