New Year Festival

On Saturday, we took the kids to the Chinese New Year Festival downtown. We've never been to it before so we decided to brave the crowds and check it out for the sake of the kids. It wasn't too bad, considering. Although, there were a lot of groups there performing that has nothing to do with Chinese New Year. Half the groups there don't seem to really even follow the lunar calendar but I guess it's slim pickings and they have to fill it out with some things.

They also had fireworks over the library at the end, but we did not stay that long to see it. Also, it was nice to run into a few friends while we were out and about.

I wanted to show the girls' the chinese pavilion in front of the library since it is usually locked up but it was swamped with weirdos in "manga" costumes most of the time. 

We mostly went to see the the lion dance though and that is always fun.

Chinese New Year

We went on Saturday to celebrate Chinese New Year, as usual, with my family. We usually go pretty early to help my mom get stuff started. We cooked and ate pretty much all day long (which doesn't do my goal of losing some weight any good...but, Chinese New Year only comes once a year!).

We had quite an assembly line going. It's nice how all the kids and grandkids can all help out now. It makes it go faster and makes it a lot more fun. Hopefully all the kids will all learn to do it so that we can keep the tradition going.

The kids got to collect lucky red envelopes from their grandparents and all their aunties and uncles!

New Year's day was actually on Monday. We had more chinese food for dinner and for FHE, we had special Chinese New Year crafts as an activity for the kids.

The kids worked on paper dragons while Christian worked on making "Spring couplets" to put up for an auspicious New Year.

Starry Starry Night

On the evening of January 3rd or the pre-dawn hours of January 4th, was to be the beginning of the Quadrantid meteor shower. We decided to stay up and try to catch it in a stop motion video.

Over a two hour period, which was supposed to be during the peak of the meteor shower in our time zone, we captured not one single falling star. We did, however, capture 23 air planes flying through just the camera's field of vision. That says nothing of the ones all around us, outside the camera's field of vision. Why is there so much traffic up there in the middle of the night?! It is totally insane.

We did each see two falling stars that were not captured on the camera. One big one that we both saw and two separate smaller ones that we saw on our own. So I can attest that there were at least all of 3 falling stars during that two hour period. And for our efforts, we just ended up cold, tired and disappointed.

I checked a bunch of youtube videos others had posted after the fact and found that many others had the same results as we did in other parts of the country (although, some supposed that the airplanes going across, were falling stars). Only one person seemed to have captured a halfway decent meteor shower.

Bike ride

We spent the rest of the kids' winter break just playing with new Christmas toys and working out in our back garden.

We did take the girls over to the university to ride around the empty campus though. Caitlyn got her training wheels off some time after school started for the new year, but was so anxious about riding without training wheels that she would only ride about a hundred feet at a time. She would spend 10 minutes just sitting there trying to psych herself into doing it. It was a very painful process. She could do it without problems, but she was just too afraid for some reason.

So during the break, we took advantage of the flat open spaces on campus to try to get her more comfortable riding.

She finally did it and she is doing great. We did have one set back, however...after riding around about 5 times in front of the library, she slid on one corner that was full of leaves and fell. She scraped her knee. After the initial pain and everything wore off, she did get back on and ride some more so I don't think it set her back too much.

She keeps one training wheel up a bit higher on her bike though. She uses it as a kick stand as her bike does not have one!