Chinese New Year Celebration

This past Saturday we decided it was time to get out of the house for a change and leave the chores for later.  A few weeks ago I got a message from Lisa telling us about a Chinese New Year Celebration going on at the Creative Discovery Museum in Chattanooga.  We aren't going to be in town for the kick off of Chinese New Year on Feb 14th so this would be our chance to get our celebrating in with other families who adopted from China. 

The kids had a fun time exploring and playing with all the interesting things in the museum.  Eriks especially loved the area where they could dig for dinosaur bones.  He would've stayed in that sand pit all day had we allowed him.  Emi found her fun with a giant microscope.  She was moving the slides into place and trying to focus the microscope.  Seriously she is smart as a whip. 

Both Eriks and Emi made Chinese paper lanterns with help.  We all got to watch a lion dance and a Chinese martial arts demonstration.  Both were pretty cool.  After the lion dance was over, the lions came around the circle greeting everyone.  It scared Eriks to death and nearly squashed me in search of safety.  Emi on the other hand wanted to follow them around.  She thought they were cool.  She made a mad dash towards them, stopped, turned around, pointed and smiled.  She was enamored.  She made us all laugh because she was so excited about them.

Here are the photos from the day.

In this last photo one of us is trying to keep Emi from touching the lion.  She seriously was in love!

My other friend Lisa took video of the lion dance so feel free to pop over to her blog and take a look at it.