I don't know how that will turn out as the girl scout year is already half over and we are barely getting started. All the leaders still need training and background checks. A couple of Caitlyn's friends from church joined with us so we are hoping for the best. We will have to wait and see.
We baked sugar cookies with the girl scouts insignia on it for their ceremony. She got her membership pin and her first patch for learning the "Girl Scout Way."
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Emily had her award ceremony at school for their first semester.
She didn't get in the group with the highest achieving GPA's but she managed to pick up her grades enough in most of her classes, except for one, to give her a pretty decent GPA. I'm pretty happy with what she ended up with but not so thrilled about her habits and laziness in getting there. Most of her friends still managed to get good grades. I'm hoping she will have learned her lesson and do better in the next semester. I'm not overly confident about that though.
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In light of us losing our climbing gym membership soon, we have been working on our little climbing wall in our backyard. We are connecting it to the kids treehouse. The kids are pretty ecstatic about that as we have only been able to take them to the gym once a month anyway.
We finished the first section of the wall. We have two more parts currently planned. Depending on how well it works out and how much we all use it, we will probably continue to add on to it.
The kids had a lot of fun working on it. We let them help us plan it out and put in the first holds.
After climbing on it a few times, they are already starting to think about things they would want to change or add to make it even better. It will be a work in progress.
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On Valentine's Day, we had to go visit with my family. Chinese New Year is the next week so this weekend, we had to have our customary reunion dinner. This is one of the most important days of the year for Chinese families. They will travel from all around the country to return home to have dinner with their family to reinforce our cohesive family unit. It's supposed to be on the Eve of the New Year but as the kids have school and we are not close, we do what we can.
This year it happened to land on Valentine's Day. We considered doing it on Sunday but my sister and her family have to visit with her husband's family as well.
In the morning, I had little Valentine's gifts for Christian and the girls. I had it out for them when they came for breakfast. Then we went for a walk up in the hills in back of our house. The girls have been working on a service project to pick up trash in the climbing areas we've been visiting...to leave the areas cleaner than when we arrived. We are really hard on our kids and require them to do more than pick up a bag full of trash and sign them off on their project. They have picked up trash from Yosemite, Joshua Tree, Mt. Rubidoux and in our local Box Springs Mtns. When their service project is over, we will still ask them to continue helping keep our wilderness places clean so as not to let the bad seeds ruin our favorite areas.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that go up in the local areas to party and always leave a mess so there was no shortage of trash when they finished their project.
While we were up in the mountains, Christian wanted to check out a crack climb on the side of the main wall up there. It is supposed to be a pretty hard climb but Christian really liked it.
We brought my harness so that I could belay him but I did not bring my shoes to attempt it myself. While Christian climbed, Emily took a few pictures for me and Caitlyn climbed around on the boulders and played with what was available.
I love that our kids can find ways to amuse and entertain themselves without constant toys or video games.
After we got home and cleaned up, we went to my mom's to help her cook. She's getting old and it is difficult for her to do so much all by herself now.
We started with a late lunch of winter solstice soup. We were supposed to just have dinner but I guess my brother thought it was lunch and showed up early.
After lunch, we spent a lot of timing prepping for dinner as we were planning on having a lot of dishes. A lot of the food that we eat have meaning and symbolizes different things like noodles for long life, or whole fish that symbolizes abundance and whole chicken which symbolizes opportunities. A lot of it is based on what the Chinese words for those things sound like. For other things, it is what the food looks like. For example, dumplings are made in the shape of gold ingots to represent wealth or fried spring rolls represent gold bars. Anyway, I always joke that everything has some kind of meaning so we have one of each animal on our table!
I was too busy to take any pictures and too tired to even remember to do it. My brother and sister went home after lunch to work on a dish or two on their own. I don't know how my mom used to do all this on her own. Grant it that she did not have quite so many people to cook for when we were younger and there were no extra spouses or grandchildren to feed but still, it is an incredible amount of work but we love it and I'm glad that my children can experience it. I would hate for her to give up and have us go out for dinner like so many others. It takes a lot of the family and togetherness out of it when you are not at home and are around a bunch of strangers and not eating the food of our childhood.
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