Dragon Parade!

 The week before Chinese New Year,  Laney's teacher let me read her class a story about CNY, answer questions, bring in our lion puppet and pass out red envelopes with chocolate coins in them.  (even though we would never put actual coins in a red envelope)  I LOVED getting to share with her class a little about Laney's heritage.   I told her class that there was a really big holiday coming up and that in some places in the world it was THE biggest holiday of the year.  I asked them if any of them could guess what it was and their first guess was "The 100th Day of School!!!?!?!?!"  Pretty hilarious!  I told them that it was Chinese New Year and asked them if any of them could guess why our family celebrates CNY.  None of them had any ideas, which I think speaks to how little children just don't see skin color and register it as something noteworthy. 

The day of Chinese New Year's Eve, we were all playing in the playroom while Todd was working diligently at some home improvement project of ours.  (The list is so long it would be impossible to recall exactly which one it was)  I decided that I wanted to see if there was something nearby that we could do that weekend to celebrate CNY!!  I found that there was dragon festival and parade at The Crow Museum in Dallas that started a few hours later!  We raced around and got everyone ready to go and headed out for a night in Dallas!  We parked at a meter and Laney helped put the coins in.  Then we walked to the museum.  It felt a little weird walking through downtown Dallas in the evening holding our kids' hands.

 The first exhibit that we saw was a girl playing a Chinese harp.  Laney and Todd sat and watched her while the brothers and I stood in line to create paper lanterns.

 They passed out glow necklaces galore when we got there.  Laney turned hers into a crown!

 Paper lanterns!

Sam and Todd had to zip off to the bathroom.  You can't mess around with recently potty trained boys. They say that they need to go potty and we move!

 Miles and I stopped at a table to write our wishes on notecards.  Miles did some "writing" and told me that he wished for a tree!

 There were some pretty spectacular KungFu demonstrations.  We particularly liked the gymnastic-y ones!

 Waiting and waiting and waiting for the dragon to finally make it's appearance!

 The dragon arrived and danced up and down the street chasing after the pearl, representing the sun and wisdom!  It wasr really amazing.  His eyes lit up red, which kind of freaked my kids out, but they were still incredibly impressed!

 After the dragon dance, the lions came out!  These were so cute!!! They had these big eyelashes and moving eyelids so they kept blinking and winking at us!  Their little ears and noses could wiggle around! So cute.  The lions come around to all the spectators so that we could each put a red envelope in it's mouth.  Our kids were all set to do it, but they all bailed once the lion got close!  Maybe next year!