Chinese New Year

We don't celebrate Valentine's day in our house, but we like Chinese New Year. It's a good excuse to eat Chinese food :0) In addition, there's a blog competition if you post about what you did.....



I really don't expect to win anything but I thought it would be fun to enter and it gave me that extra bit of incentive to blog what we did.

ETA : There are some really good ideas on the other blogs. It looks like everyone has had a lovely time :0)

We kept it very simple due to everyone being tired. The kids had a sleepover with their cousins last night so were late to bed and early to rise and consequently a little bit touchy. In fact, the Boy fell asleep as soon as we had eaten. Bless!

We had Chinese takeaway which we ate with chopsticks. We had fortune cookies and green tea to go with it.


The girl made a pipecleaner tiger for the Year of the Tiger. It took some doing, especially working out how to make the head but she got there in the end :0)



She has a Chinese Zodiac book with complex mazes in that she loves, so that was a good excuse to bring that out.



We read a copy of the National Geographic from 2008 which was all about China. Actually, there's a lot of reading in the NG and most of it would go over her head so we looked at the photos and read the captions. I love their photos, so many aspects of Chinese life were portrayed. We ended up discussing all sorts of things, including the Great Wall of China and The Forbidden City. On the pleasant side, the Girl was surprised that Chinese people from different regions looked so different to each other. On the not so pleasant side, questions were asked about the treatment of animals and Tianneman Square.

We found China on the globe to see how big it is and discussed over-population and the one child policy. The girl came up with an interesting question - what happens if you have twins in China? As yet, I haven't been able to find the answer.