Yesterday was Chinese New Year, and we decided that celebrating this day would liven up a dull end of the month. I am looking to add a bit more structure to our weeks/months and celebrating national, international and certain religious festival and feast days certainly seems to be a good way to do it. We will be able to do crafting, prepare food, learn about other cultures or societies and come together as a family on what would otherwise be regular days. I have been reading a fair bit about Waldorf Montesorri recently and I have a few posts about it in my head.
Anyway, here is what we did yesterday.
First we (and really I mean me), cleaned, cleaned, cleaned. Then we hung our decorations.
These lanterns we bought from our local Chinese market
Lucky fish
I cut these out from red paper and Oscar glittered them with gold glitter
I had to make these lanterns myself because they would be too tricky for Oscar, but he threaded them onto the string for me
This is our egg carton table dragon
Its a bit snake like, but you can blame me for that, I think each section should have had red feet attached
For dinner we had vegi chow mien, beef in oyster sauce, chili seafood noodles, egg noodles, rice and prawn crackers.
It was all home made (not ordered in), and Oscar even managed to eat a little bit of it with his chop sticks
Desert was a strange watermelon pudding jelly from the Chinese market. It was not as bad as it sounds, and Oscar liked it which is just as well because it was buy one tray, get one free lol
It is Chinese custom to give red envelopes with money inside at New Year, so taking a leaf from Sarah I made some envelopes from red satin napkins (£1 for 4 from Poundland), and inside I put some chocolate coins. Which I think means more to Oscar at this age than real money anyway.
After dinner we played some traditional Chinese music and Oscar and Daddy danced around.............em oh no, make that, Daddy was the dragon and Oscar was the little child trying to run away.
We have been reading a couple of lovely books over the last week, in preparation for the day.
This book is not really a story, its more of a descriptive of what happens at Chinese New Year. The language is very clear and simple and the illustrations are lovely. I can highly recommend it.
This book, Oscar loves and is a female take on the traditional Chinese story, The Seven Chinese Brothers. This has been Oscars choice at bedtime all week. This was an excellent choice.
And that's us. We had a lovely time, and as I said, it would have otherwise been a rather dull Monday.
Valerie
xxx
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