Happy (Chinese) New Year!

Oh, these were the days. And by that I mean, the days of last week before the stomach bug that is currently wrecking havoc on our lives hit. I remember those days fondly.

Anyway, moving on...

Lucy received a subscription to Ladybug for Christmas from her grandparents and this first issue was all about Chinese New Year so of course, she insisted we celebrate. It ended up being a good idea because with all the storms at the beginning of the month, I has already used up all our "Worlds of Learning" fun plans and was in need of some inspiration.

We started with a couple books about China and Chinese New Year. We read a couple non-fiction ones that describe Chinese New Year too but these three story based books were her favorites:

The Emperor and the Kite 

Lon Po Po : a Red-Riding Hood story from China 

 The Runaway Wok : a Chinese New Year tale 

Then we had to decorate by making Chinese Lanterns. Lucy was able to do these almost completely on her own. For the first, I folded the paper in half and drew the lines and she cut and taped. After that first one, she wanted to draw the lines and did a great job.


We hung them with clear thread and tape which apparently is magical when you are little. 



Her magazine came with a dragon craft so we put that together while listening to some Chinese New Years music courtesy of youtube. I thought I had cute pictures of the kids playing but my sd card died and it took all of Thursday night to retreive this and that one apparently didn't make it (neither did my bathroom pictures so I'll be posting about that as soon as I get a new one)

But the most fun we had the whole week was the red and yellow spaghetti. I made a big batch of spagetti, added a bit of oil and food coloring and just let them play.






They started all nice but I won't lie, by the end of the hour, the kitchen looked like this. 



But did you catch that? The hour! They played with this forever. I highly recommend it. Just do what I did and plan it for a day you need to mop anyway. You will definitely need to mop. But as luck would have it, a big part of preparing for Chinese New Year was cleaning so while I mopped, my little helpers dusted and helped tidy. Hmm. Maybe we should celebrate CNY every week?

For dinner I serving Chinese food, red bean steamed buns and the oh-so-traditional Mrs. Fields cookie. What? You've never heard of those being served on Chinese New Year? Well, Lucy insisted and when your little helpers are this cute, how can you say no?