New Traditions

About a month ago, Caden asked me if we could celebrate the new year. I was really surprised he had already forgotten our New Year's Eve party just a few weeks ago! Then he clarified and said, "I mean the Chinese New Year." I thought that sounded like fun, but the only thing I knew about it was they have dragons and fireworks, so I wasn't sure where to go with it. After a little searching on the Internet, I learned when it was and found a few fun crafts we could do. We made good luck paper oranges, paper lanterns, fans, and some paper dragon puppets.


We all wore red and had 8 things to eat, because 8 is apparently a lucky number! The boys were excited to eat with chopsticks.


We even made our own fortune cookies, which were much tastier than the store bought. The boys made up the fortunes with Steve the night before. My favorite was, "You dog will bark a lot when the door bell rings." :)


Steve had to work late that night and missed most of it, but he came home in time to give the boys red envelopes with a dollar each in them. Turns out Caden knew about these envelopes, and now I'm thinking I did all this just because Caden wanted some money!


It was all very fun and something I'd like to keep doing, but in the future I hope we have more time to learn and talk about the traditions.