Busy

We've been so busy lately. It seems that things haven't slowed down since Thanksgiving. There always seems to be something or other going on.

There was a daddy-daughter activity this past weekend. The theme was for a hoe-down. Emily was excited and had been looking forward to it all week.

She gets dad to herself this one last year at these things as Caitlyn will be going next time too. They didn't get to stay for all the activities though since dinner started late and apparently there was a very long line at the chuck wagon.

Christian and I had to give talks at church the next morning and Christian wasn't quite done with his by the time they had to go.

Caitlyn and I had dinner and I let Caitlyn choose what she wanted to do together.  She chose to play Wii, so that's what we ended up doing most of the time that they were gone.

After church, we had a bunch of friends over for lunch. Chinese New Year is celebrated for 15 days normally. It ends with the lantern festival. We decided to try our hand at making our traditional New Year's dumplings. We have been working on parts of it with my mom for many years now, but we have never attempted to do it all on our own before. The hardest part was the filling, as my mother usually prepares that by herself prior to us arriving. And I guess when I lived at home still, I was just a stupid kid who never paid that much attention to how it is exactly made. Most Chinese home cooks don't really have set recipes on how to cook things. They just throw stuff together and it tastes fabulous so it has always been difficult for me to learn how to replicate things my parents made.

I wrote down (more or less) what ingredients are in the dumpling filling, but had to guess on the proportions quite a bit.

We thought we would invite a bunch of people over to taste our dumplings and teach them a little of how to make them. The dumplings we make are very traditional in the area of China that my parent's grew up in but is not really widely had elsewhere, so it is apparently quite unique. I have not met anyone else who make them.

It was a bit chaotic at first as Caitlyn and I came home from church an hour later than everyone else because we had a Baptismal Preview meeting after church. We also ended up having a lot more people over than we had expected, but everything turned out great in the end. The dumplings tasted pretty good (although the flavor was not exactly like my mother's). One of the other girls brought some other traditional New Year's food for us to try as well. She had never made it on her own either so it was pretty exciting.

I also made taro cake the day before so that we can slice them and fry them up so that we can get something to eat while we make the dumplings. I have never made them before either so that was new for me as well. It turned out pretty good but, again, they did not quite taste like my mother's! She actually bought some of the hard to get supplies for me and we picked them up the week before on our way to another party. I have not yet had a chance to tell her how everything turned out.

Everyone seemed to like the dumplings as there was not one left at the end of the afternoon. And everyone seemed to have a great time so I guess it was a success.

We think that it is very important to keep these traditions and to pass them down through the generations. Hopefully, we will be able to instill a love for it to our own girls and that they will one day learn to do it with their families on their own as well.

Valentine's Day

We didn't have much of a Valentine's here. The kids wouldn't do their work (as is customary these days) and so they didn't get a chance to do their Valentine's for school the day before. Thursday morning, Caitlyn woke up with a really high fever and ended up staying in bed. She was so sad. Emily signed all her Valentine's in a hurry before having to rush off to catch the bus. She wasn't quite done either and had to finish up at school.

Sadly, this is not the first Valentine's Caitlyn has missed because of sickness. It seems that this is a really bad time of year for her. She's been very sick on lots of special occasions this time of year. Chinese New Year, Valentine's day, and even her birthday. I hope that she will be well for her birthday this year, it is going to be a big one for her. She was supposed to get another award today at school as well for First In Math. She missed that too.

She slept on and off all day. When school was almost over, she felt a little better and we rushed off to school to pick up Emily and drop off her Valentine's to her classmates. We had just enough time to do that and pick up her Valentine's that her teacher saved for her. They had already started lining up to leave when we got there.

Emily offered to pick them up for her but the last time we had her do that a couple of year's ago, she lost the whole bag of treats, cards and crafts that Caitlyn had been working on. We were really upset about it and was not going to go there again!

Caitlyn was still feeling pretty weak even though I dropped her off at the front and went to get the car to pick her up again when we were done. The 10 minute outing we took to school tired her out so after we came back and the girls got to look through their Valentine's cards and stuff, Caitlyn went back to nap once again. This time, she had a longer, more restful sleep.

We couldn't have anything too rich for our meal since Caitlyn wouldn't be able to eat it anyway, so we didn't make anything very special and then the day was pretty much done.

Luckily, we had a four day weekend for her to recover, so she did return to school this morning.

Chinese New Year

On the day before the New Year begins, family from far and wide, reunite to have dinner together. Luckily, all our immediate family is local and no one has to travel very far. In fact, we live the farthest from my family. Both of my siblings are fairly close to where my parents live. We have a traditional sticky rice dumpling soup which signifies family unity.

We arrive in the morning to help my mother prepare food. Besides the soup, we prepare taro cake, daikon cake (neither of which are really cakes as in a sweet dessert, but savory dim sum type dishes), and dumplings shaped like gold ingots.

We basically get together, talk, cook and eat all day. This is the first year Caitlyn and Emily took advantage of all the food offered. They were little bottomless pits. Nobody could believe how much food they could put away and they were having a blast doing it. We were a little jealous that we are not able to eat like that anymore.

Meanwhile, the girls are not only learning to appreciate eating all the tasty food, but also how to make them. We usually have an assembly line going as the youngest kids work on the easiest jobs and as they get older, they get to try their hand at some of the more difficult parts. We really want  the kids to learn all the different aspects of making dumplings so that they can keep the tradition alive and continue it with their own families some day.

Preliminary Chinese New Year Celebrations

There were two classes in the kids' school that recognized Chinese New Year. This is not unusual, as there are only a small handful of asian kids in each grade at best. One class has a Chinese teacher and the other class has a teacher with a Chinese daughter-in-law. Emily happens to be in one of the classes and Caitlyn in the other. What are the chances of that? Anyway, the girls were super excited. Their classes got to try some Chinese food and use chopsticks, listen to Chinese folk tales and make a craft.

I made a big batch of lo mein for each of their classes. It was a lot of extra work and made a huge mess in my kitchen two days in a row, but the kids had a lot of fun with it. Luckily, they didn't have Chinese food on the same day or I wouldn't have been able to do it at all.

Science Fair

Last week, Emily's school finally held their science fair. It was the school's first year doing it, so it was totally optional...volunteer basis only. They still got quite a few participants (although, a few of them did not follow any of the required guidelines issued). They may make it mandatory for at least the upper grades next year, I'm not certain. I don't think that they have even quite decided. There were two categories: K-3 and 4-6. The three winners of the 4th through 6th grade entries would continue on to the district science fair at UCR. But since all the kids volunteered to do this extra activity, they all got ribbons for participating and little pins to add to their lanyards. Emily was pretty happy about that.

Besides all of the science fair displays, the school's Lego League also had their display of what they have been working on so far. Caitlyn was excited about that. She wanted to join when Emily was asked to join, but unfortunately, she is still too young. Her current math teacher and Emily's former teacher is the one that heads that up so she is just counting down until she can join. Maybe it will encourage her to be more responsible about her school work as she will be under the same time constraints as Emily has this year. Emily has not made any effort into being more responsible and managing her time better, so I don't feel that bad for not letting her join the Lego League. She would like to join, but she never showed as much excitement for it as Caitlyn does. We'll see if it makes any difference.

This is the first year for the Lego League at their school as well. The new principal has been working really hard to make the school better and encourage kids in things they may be excited to learn and we've been pretty happy about the changes in the school since he started. I hope that it will make a difference as our school has been on "Program Improvement" for the past four years or so now. They have made slight improvements every year, but it is not yet been enough. Hopefully they will make it above their goal this year.

Luau

The girls' dance teacher threw a luau in honor of her granddaughter's 1st birthday on Saturday. It was to be our girls' first performance. The other three girls had previously been in another recital just before we started lessons. We didn't really have costumes, but they borrowed some things from other dancers at the last minute. It was a bit stressful but it turned out really great.

The Keikis did 3 numbers: Pearly Shells, a poi ball routine from New Zealand and a Tahitian number called the Keiki Otea  (I think).

I was worried if the girls would be too nervous or scared to go up, but when it was their turn, they marched right up and did their performance. We were so proud of them. I was also a bit worried about their performance because I had been trying to get them to practice all week before the Luau, but since they have been taking their sweet time to do their homework, it left pretty much no time to practice. We had them cram in a bit of practice on Friday night and Saturday morning and they did it very grudgingly. But it definitely paid off because they did a lot better than they had on their Monday class.

There were two other groups of girls that performed as well. I only got to see some of the older girls' performance because we had to get our girls off and changed for their next performance in between dances.

We mostly missed the Junior Wahines because they went on right after the Keikis. All the girls did great though and it was a lot of fun. Plus the food was wonderful!

I had some trouble taking pictures of the girls dancing though because of the movement and my camera kept focusing on the plants in the front! I was a little upset that we didn't get some better pictures. Christian was doing video and that came out really good, so at least we have that...plus I got to watch the performances that we missed!

We did manage to take a couple of group shots of all the girls before they went on stage though.

Their costumes were so beautiful. In the end, the girls said that the performances was not so bad. They were really dreading it. They like to dance and they were excited about the costumes but performing in front of a ton of people was not  something they were looking forward to (to put it mildly). I asked them if they were still interested in continuing with their lessons and they definitely are, so it didn't traumatize them too much and they ended up having a lot of fun.

Accelerated Reader

The principal at the girls' school has decided to try to motivate the kids more between trimesters by recognizing students more often. Caitlyn was awarded as the highest point earner in the 2nd grade at her school for the accelerated reader program. Hooray!