Chinese New Year

Gong xi gong xi! It was Chinese new year recently, and we had loads of people over at ours. This year, the first day of CNY was on Feb 14^th – Valentine’s day. Perfect reason for Daddy to ignore that day! LOL. We started with lunch with 2 other families. We started with curry puffs (chicken and vegetarian), fried wan tons (meat and also just shrimp) and sweet and sour soup made by R, and then everyone had their own version of laksa… everyone put what they want on their own laksa. This was because we had a vegetarian and so wanted to give everyone a chance to choose what they wanted to go into their bowl. It worked!! We lingered over lunch and then soon, it was time for ‘gouter’…. And wow, did we have lots. I think we counted more than 40 people in our little house! I had made about 150 pineapple tarts, 100 sugi cookies and 50 melting moments, plus 2 banana bread; they were all mostly gone by the end of the day. I managed to save some for ourselves (and a little for our offices) – the girls loved the pineapple tarts and couldn’t stop eating them. Daddy favored the sugi cookies (made from ghee) himself (I admit that I do too – they were a bit salty). The girls had lots of fun with all the kids that came, and were, I’m pleased to say, very happy to share their toys with everyone. Their favorite though, is hide and seek! And THAT is Seraphine’s favorite game … she can do it really well too! She will hide her eyes and count (she actually does a pretty decent job of counting to 10…the numbers are mixed up but she’s got most of the numbers correct, and she can definitely count up to 5) and go running squealing in delight. Bibou (well Seraphine too) is one of the one worst hider I know, as she cannot stop giggling! Now, the girls, esp Seraphine, loves to ‘hide’ esp when they hear us coming (either up or down the stairs) and you can hear Seraphine shouting in delight to bibou “quick bibou, hide hide, HIDE, giggle giggle”.

The best part though was dressing the girls up. Kongkong had sent these gorgeous Chinese outfits and the girls were soooo thrilled to wear them. So much so that they even endured sitting down quietly and letting me play with their hair. Actually, they love dress up so much, they’ll sit through anything to look good. They were super excited when they saw each other in the same outfit and same hair style. They scrambled to get their new Chinese slippers and off they went, prancing and dancing in front of the mirror.

Anyway, enjoy this batch of photos of the girls in their best chinese outfits so far!