dear old noodle friend!

our noodle shop closed down, our friends moved to the big city to find better work...but for Chinese New Year, they came home to see their family here and spent a day with us! It was so sweet because everyday we pass the old shop, Josiah still talks about them. He has grown to love a few local families, this being one of them, and they have all moved away...but it is so precious that he remembers his noodle Ayi and got to see her!

February Fun!

This is really only the first 2 weeks...we will be traveling soon...so we thought we'd go ahead and post some fun memories :)
We are still in the gloomy months of Winter around here :( We have had a few nice days to play outside- yippie yay for that! And our local Chinese Preschool started back up so we love going- no pics right now due to the rain...but i'm sure we'll get some for you later...

I love how Josiah paints his rainbow so big-boyish now with each part having a distinct color!

Evie Joy cutting, pasting and painting rainbows for the letter "R" - her rainbow ended up looking like a big glob of black haha!

Josiah is separating big "R"s and little "r" s

Jo has really been into building forts which he calls tents!

They love water gun fighting in the bathtub!

Evie Joy has no idea how to properly hold the gun! ha!

Learning about opposites...we drew pictures upside down/under the table!

so why did i decide to do a paper mache project with my 2 year old?

so our snowman/winter preschool lesson suggested going outside and making a snowman or making one out of paper mache...i thought oh, that could be fun...evie joy loved the idea of making something, playing with the balloon, glue, ripping paper, painting...but really it took a lot of time for not a lot of great results...finally after all the effort, we never really assembled a snowman. i mean evie joy really was waiting for the candy anyways- to bust open the snowman! i couldn't think of anything i had that would work to stick it together since we dont' have a hot glue gun and we didn't really have anything to decorate it with and so i just let them like this :) and put candy inside and we busted open our partially made snowman pinata!

by the way josiah only spent like 20 minutes working on the snowman...evie joy like an hour :) so we will give it that- it entertained my high-demand child for an hour!

she is so excited about the candy!!!!

excited he knocked it down!

rubs his tummy and says "hao chi"

me and my girl and our matching red vests!

if you hadn't noticed a common theme from the Chinese New Year's Post- Mommy was nowhere to be seen, haha! But our sweet MiMi bought us these matching red vests and we wear them all the time, especially to all our Chinese New Year's events since red is their color of blessing and joy and all that good stuff :) So Daddy managed to snap a few shots of matching Mommy and Evie Joy! Love my sweet girl!

our Chinese New Year!

So what have we been doing? oh my...well Chinese New Year Celebrations have finally ended! haha! They last 2-3 weeks of non-stop bomb sounding fireworks! We celebrated with 3 different of our friends/neighbors....here are a few not really that great pictures...

This is us at our friend Kelly's house!

At our friend Jennifer's house! We ate yak this night! It was really tasty!

So here are a few not really so great pics of the fireworks...but for memory sake...there were lots of fireworks! Sometimes I would hear Josiah say on his bed "oh it's fireworks! " ha and he didn't really like looking out our window at them because he was irritated his friends Isaac and Owen were not with him from America :)

This is us at our friend Huan Huan and Le Le's house. We had some rabbit, duck, liver and kidney that night :) WE apparently like all that stuff, haha!

The kids love toasting in Chinese "gan bei"!

hot pot with a playground- the good life :)

this is where we have been enjoying hanging out :) it is only about a 10 minute walk from our house and in the middle of the day it is normally not too busy! we were so excited to have stumbled upon it and find this fun playground! this day there were a few other kids there as you can see the 2 boys with their guns...

Sissy loves the horsey :) one day she rocked so hard she flipped but that doesn't stop her! You think our kids wear a lot? Check out this little boy pictuerd- he is one stuffed kid! :)

This is us eating hot pot :) not really exciting shots but we like it!

some January play-learning fun!

so what have we been doing on the rainiest-coldest month of the year? and when the city's population doubles or triples and when we get out, we have to trek through the cold rain to our desired over crowded destination, yes we haven't been really excited about this month :) but tried to make the most of it! Evie Joy loves lacing! We got these awhile back from our friends Karissa and Alison but recently she has really been able to lace them all on and off! More recently they sent us some lacing cards and she loves doing them as well! (Also please note the common theme that Evie Joy loves wearing her footed pj's - she has many beautiful clothes but she is very stubborn everyday to wear her pj's so we use them as her 2nd layer of 3 or 4 layers when we go out :))

we loved this moment above- they were "cooking" together!

And below "praying" together! super sweet and super rare- they fight a lot these days.

size sorting "Nests" for the Letter N

I restocked our corn, rice and beans for playing so we have been enjoying playing with them the past few weeks!

Oh yes, and this day...well Evie Joy (in another set of pj's) kept asking to watch Thomas- we hadn't watched Thomas for awhile so i put a show on and we set up some tracks and kept adding tunnels and McQueen and Jesus' stable...it was a fun few hours of playing on a rainy day for us!

blocks...last week was the week of blocks! hours a day we created and re-created so many interesting things with our blocks. Mommy and Daddy and cars and cakes...One of my favorites is Evie Joy made a blue block Daddy and ran from it because it was going to spank her :) and the real Daddy was not even home :) cracks me up!

and please notice her football pj's this day!

oh yes and below- this day Evie Joy refused to take a nap. She received several spankings from Daddy who was here during nap time that day and still did not nap :( so after hearing her yell for me to come look at her, i finally did- she was dressed like this saying she was "Darby" and the lei was her underwear :) She is all about putting her "underwear" on these days- she has used a rope, a basket, i forget what else right now, but non-conventional items for "underwear"

And you can see on the table in front of EJ the verses on a 4x6 paper. We love First Look Preschool Curriculum for memorizing verses. They have actions for us to practice so the kids love to have Circle Time and practice verses :) And we still love our Magic Erase board bought at a yard sale with cousin Chanse for 1 dollar!

Josiah is working on his new pattern pictures from Alison and Karissa! Also loving these! We've tried doing some other things for patterns but these are definitely more fun for Jo and EJ!

Josiah and his 2 kuai letters! love them! and his new scissors he loves from Ali & K! They sent these little boxes with each of their names on and inside they have a school pencil, colored pencils, crayons and Jo scissors- they kids get so excited using their personal boxes!

Josiah has been loving his new LeapFrog videos about Math so he has been all about counting and pretending he is adding and subtracting like Tad & Lily :)

Jo was using the letters with his Word World cards to make words!

Evie Joy so proud of her pattern pictures- she calls this one "Brother"!

So we've been learning a lot :) Trying to survive January! WE do get out everyday at least once but it is usually raining so we don't have a lot of pics from our outing adventures :)