Our Start of Lunar New Year Week

We're back on track, as far as days of the week go!  I'm celebrating that almost as much as the Year of the Ox!  I do love that Lunar New Year is a 15 day festival, so we're bound to continue to have Chinese themed projects and decor for the next two weeks.  

 

I've been helping Sam with various aspects of adulting, and we're making real progress in his transition to civilian life.  He needed to upload a photo for his veteran ID card (which we can do online right now, #thanks2covid) and this is what we came up with.  

For the first night of Lunar New Year, I picked up a feast at a local Chinese restaurant that we hadn't tried before.  

I was going to take a picture of each dish as it came by, and put them together in a collage to share with you, but after the amazing wonton soup, I stopped caring if I documented anything and focused on snarfing.  

The leftover dragon cutouts from the CNY cards I made to send the adult children turned into a banner for over the table.  We had Chinese music playing in the background while we ate, too.  It was quite lovely.  

The girls got new t-shirts for Lunar New Year.  I realize Katie's is more Japanese, but I'm okay with that, since we just wrapped up our study of Japan.  

Have I mentioned I dislike transition lenses?  I'd love to be able to see Hannah's pretty eyes in outdoor photos.  Note to self:  tell Paul NO transition lenses next time he takes her for new glasses.  

Someone wrote on my calendar, while they were scheduling an appointment on the phone.  I don't know where I'm driving them, but I appreciate the amusing heads up.  

One of Hannah's projects this week is a nod to the ancient Chinese art of papercutting.  This is actually the second attempt.  The first one was somewhat lacking in effort and following directions.  

This is what happens when the library is closed 2 weeks, instead of the one week we were expecting.  A few stragglers came in to the branch across town.

Hannah got a book in German, because she wanted to see if she could use her 5 language dictionary from Christmas and read it.  I suggested she start with a board book.  

I'll just lay these bags here for a picture real quick...

Oh Grumman.  

One of Katie's projects this week was faux wheat painting, using toothpicks.  It's a compass.  

Other, unphotographed projects this week include something about squid ink, and something involving blowing across bottles.  

Hannah was unavailable for a photo, so Sam stood in holding her kimono drawing.  

This is what happens when the library has a week's worth of incoming holds that we weren't allowed to pick up.  

Pagodas!  

Grumman instructs us on the finer points of origami.  

Fan drawings.  

Origami penguin, I believe.  

And origami grasshopper.  

This is the project I alluded to at the end of last week's post.  We drew koi, then we used orange and green watercolor crayons to trace our drawings.  Then we brushed water over the tracing to activate the watercolor.  After that dried, we used watered down blue liquid watercolor for the water background.  After that dried, we outlined out drawings in Sharpie.  It was a little time consuming, but I love the way they turned out.  

We learned about the famous Japanese wave paintings.  Oh Grumman.  

And in Swimming Creatures, we learned about plesiosauruses.  

So, of course we had to make origami plesiosauruses, draw them, paint them, write a plesiosaurus haiku...  I like to take a theme and run with it.  

I picked up the Draw Write Now ocean book, and decided to step away from Art Projects For Kids for a moment and have the girls do something different.  I let them choose any drawing of sea life in the book.  Notice the blue backgrounds have a bit of "sunlight" streaming in from above the water?  Sigh.  Our new markers are already dying.  Katie got about 6 blue backgrounds, and now we're back to where we started.  Color me unimpressed.  

A rare moment to catch on "film."  Jack looked cute hanging out with Grumman, and actually let me take a picture.  Generally I get photos of Jack's palm any time I point a camera in his direction.  

We're going to start learning about Russia in the coming week.  I'm looking forward to having the girls watch Anastasia (after some actual documentaries and more factual videos, of course).