Happy Chinese New Year!!! I know that I am about two weeks late, but between weather and the fickleness of planning with three kids, we only just got around to actually celebrating the Chinese New Year. Since we only have the two older kids on the weekends (the pros and cons of a blended family!) I try and plan at least one big sit-down meal and some sort of crafty activity to do with them.
Two weeks ago, we celebrated Chinese New Year, which was at that point a week after the fact but it was awesome. I created a Pinterest board to collect ideas for Chinese food, crafts and decorations that I ended up almost completely ignoring. We are lucky enough to have a relatively diverse neighborhood so we do have a Chinese supermarket in town, so Hubby and I went there to try and find some decorations and food. Oddly enough, they had no little Red envelopes so I was disappointed. We picked up scallion pancakes, chicken dumplings, sweetnsour sauce, soy sauce, almond cookies, jelly candies, wasabi peas, red bean pastries, coconut flavoured cookies, Panda cookies, and some other random bits. I also had meatballs and chicken in the freezer that I ended up using. Weirdly, the meatballs were Italian seasoned which I did not account for when cooking them, but they turned out okay.
Through Pinterest, I found great instructions for making paper fortune cookies. I was under the impression that no one in our family really liked the taste of fortune cookies, I was mistaken. Note for future parties, fortune cookies are an okay choice.
While Hubby was at work, the kids and I decorated a bit and then I tried to help them through making the fortune cookies. This was one of those stressful momma activities that I did not forecast. I tested out a few to make sure that I knew how to make them, I laid out all the supplies so that we all had our own circle template, glue sticks, pencils and scissors. I thought that this would limit the fights. I was incorrect. We were about two minutes into the project when the baby woke up from his nap so I had to go and get him. In the time that it took me to walk from the kitchen table to the bedroom and back, the two older kids got in a fight over gold shiny paper and ripped one of my scrapbooking templates. This did not set the mood well for me, I took the paper away all together, I still don't know if that was the best option but sometimes I need to wipe the slate and start over.
The instructions were easy to follow, but our ten year old does not have much patience and when things do not work out immediately, a meltdown is imminent and our eight year old would much rather just do whatever grabs her goat before listening to any instructions. So while I was positive that this craft was in their ballpark, I was a little wrong. It may very well be a child dependent craft so heads up!
This was my template, I was able to get four cookies out of one sheet of 12 x 12 scrapbooking paper. I missed mentioning that to the kids and then just traced their circle into the middle of the paper, thus getting one cookie per sheet. Next time, I may just make them all and have the kids write the fortunes. That was hands down the best part of the entire project. We all wrote our own fortunes, some funny, some mean, some good, some random. Since Hubby wasn't here while we made them, we made him guess who wrote them after we read them outloud.
Reading them outloud and laughing about them all made up for the stress of making them. It was really fun while we were eating to giggle over Hubby guessing incorrectly. The tutorial I found here at Duitang, which is in Chinese but Google will translate if you need but the pictures were plenty to walk me through it.
I wanted to do other crafts, but sometimes I run into a wall whether the kids are too old or two young for some things. So instead we just ate and laughed about some of the food that was not quite to out palate. Overall, it was successful, we ate tons of food and dinner lasted an hour with us just talking and trying lots of food. Happy Year of the Horse everyone!
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