Chinese New Year

We celebrated Chinese New Year a little differently this year with Mark's parents gone.  None of his family could find a time to get together this year so we did our own thing.  We definitely missed the Hsiaos and I definitely missed Alice's food.  However, I have to say Mark did an amazing job of stepping in and acting the part of his mom for our celebration.  He has her natural ability at making amazing Chinese food.

Our friends invited us to go to the celebration at the Salt Lake Library with them, so we invited them to our house to take part in a little bit of the Hsiao New Year traditions.  At the library we watched a lion dance, Chinese dancers and other performances, and made paper lanterns.

Then we headed home to prepare our dumplings!  Timmy was beyond excited about everything!

The only picture I got of Mark making food was him doing this easy task of pouring the chicken broth in for the hot and sour soup, which was delicious, but not totally the same as his mom's.

The Cooke's helped fill the dumplings and we cooked them and ate our dinner.  The kids loved looking for a penny, date, peanut or piece of rice cake inside the dumplings.

Then it was red envelope time!

Because the kids go to a Chinese Dual Immersion school, we had a lot of chances to celebrate this holiday at home and at school.  Timmy became obsessed with his Chinese outfit that Alice gave him a few years ago.  It is on the small side this year and I know it won't fit him next year.  He wore it for about 5 days straight!  I think he thought that when he put that thing on it magically turned him into a professional fighting ninja warrior or something.  He carried this sword and fan around for days and he was so funny.  He learned how to open the fan fast with one hand and it was not used as a girly fan, but a weapon along with the sword.  He kept his weapon with him at all times and would have even slept in his outfit if I would have let him.  After watching how cool Timmy seemed in his Chinese outfit, Brian really wanted one too.  Alice, I think I may have just realized what I want you to bring me from Taiwan. . .two Chinese shirts, or outfits if they aren't too expensive, for the boys!

Timmy and I went to Brian's Chinese class to help the kids make dumplings. For some reason the kids in Brian's class are obsessed with Timmy so he and Brian get tons of attention whenever he comes with me to help.  They had so much fun!

Brian's Chinese teacher gave all the kids red envelopes with real Chinese money inside!  Brian thought it was the coolest thing!

At school the kids did Chinese art projects, and got chopsticks for lunch and watched some more Chinese dancers.  We had some major celebrations for this new year of the monkey and it was fun!

Timmy's Reflections Contest Piano Composition

Timmy composed a cute little song on the piano for the Reflections Contest.  The theme this year was Let Your Imagination Fly.  So he did let his imagination fly and he wrote a song called Space Elephants.  He said it was about elephants playing basketball on the moon and he composed it all on his own with help writing the notes from me.

Well, his little composition not only won at the school level but also won at the council level.  He thought is was so cool to get a real medal for winning.

Here is the video he entered of his song.  That day he had gotten his face painted at a birthday party and it was late and the entries were due the next morning so we just quickly recorded his song even with paint on his face.  He's still cute.

January 2016

Winter is just rolling right along. It is going by maybe a little slower than I would like, but adding fun things here and there makes it go faster.  I think I want Spring to come this year because I've been sick since before Christmas and some warm Spring weather sounds really nice at the moment.

A few days after ringing in the new year we met some friends at the children's theater to watch Peter Pan.  The boys loved it!

On January 6th my mom brought some king cake for us to celebrate Three Kings Day.  The boys loved that as well!

Brian did lots of homework in January.  He is getting so big!

 One Saturday Mark took us ice fishing at Rockport.  We were joined by Jake and his kids.

Brian in particular loved ice fishing.  Even though it was freezing cold outside the tent, he stayed out there at his fishing hole just waiting for a bite. We had some bites but they all came off before Mark got them out of the hole.  Sadly we didn't catch anything, but we had fun getting outside and we stopped at the Kamas Drugstore for lunch!

One day I took the boys swimming at the Sportsmall.  They love swimming!

Mark went on a business trip to California. After his work meetings, he took a day to stay with Luke and Sunny in Palo Alto.

Luke took him around Stanford and they went out for some good food.

They were even able to meet up with Mark's cousin for dinner.

While Mark was out of town, the boys had a day off of school, so I took them to the Provo City Center Temple open house.  I was lucky to get tickets for the perfect day for us to go.  I remember playing the cello in the old Provo Tabernacle and going to stake conferences there when I was at BYU.  It was so cool to see it restored as a temple and to show the boys.  It is beautiful!

After touring the temple, we headed over to BYU and had lunch with the BYU students at the Cougar Eat.  We ate the same Subway sandwiches I would always get there as a student.  Oh boy was it fun to show Brian and Timmy BYU and to have so many  memories come flooding back to me.  I loved my time at BYU.

We went to the BYU Bookstore which the boys thought was so cool.

Then we walked over to the Museum of Art and saw the Norman Rockwell exhibit.

After viewing some Norman Rockwell, we went up to the Bean Museum.  We absolutely loved it!

Brian was really interested in President Packer's bird carving exhibit.  Brian loves to draw birds and now he wants to learn to carve them as well.

I let them choose as small item from the gift shop.  Brian got a box of shark teeth and Timmy was so into BYU that he got a lollipop with a big Y on it.

 I spent most of the drive home answering question after question about BYU and how to get into BYU etc.

We sure had a lot of snowy days in January.  One Sunday it dumped the perfect snowman building snow.  So after church we headed out to feed the animals and build some snowmen.  Mark was between meetings and cleared the driveway in his church clothes.  You can see him in the background here.

Brian and Timmy rolled those huge snowballs all by themselves!  Then with Mark's help we built a very awesome snowman.  Timmy was in Heaven.

This was from a pioneer themed Family Home Evening.  The boys could not get enough of pioneer games with Mark.