It's the most wonderful time of the year (in Asia)

Nope. Not Christmas. Here's the scoop on the Lunar New Year and how our family celebrated. (Maybe I should say "is celebrating" as the festival will continue for another week or so.)

Here's the appetizer to our walk through the New Year: My preciouses in their traditional New Year garb:

On New Year's Eve day, we packed up and headed over to our friend's grandmother's house. We ate a late but bountiful lunch with lots of relatives.

After lunch, there was a trip to the nearby park for Archie and visiting for the adults. However, firecrackers exploding constantly on the ground all around brought the excursion to a rather quick end as I feared for our safety and hearing.

The afternoon was spent playing cards, watching the New Year gala on TV, text messaging every friend you ever had, and making dumplings to eat at midnight (blog post coming soon on the art of dumpling making).

At 11 p.m., it was time to go set off our own fireworks. Can you believe they sell things this monstrous to the general public without a license?

Some pretty heavy duty fallout, wouldn't you say?

This lady made my life wonderful. She is my friend's aunt, and she loved taking care of the kids. As you can imagine, kids kept up until the midnight meal get a little grumpy, but she helped keep them happy. I enjoyed the conversation she kept having with Archie while attempting in vain to get him to take a nap during constantly exploding fireworks (these things never stopped).

Aunt: The airplane is going. (Archie loves talking about airplanes.) The rabbit is going, too. The tiger is also going. When the airplane comes back, the rabbit will come and say Hai Tao, Hai Tao (his name) wake up, wake up. Archie's eyes nearly close then jerk back awake. Deep, huh?

On Day 3 of the New Year, we went to a different friend's uncle's house for lunch. It was a crowd that was lots of fun, and the uncle is a professional chef so the meal was FABULOUS!

There were also lots of uncles and aunts for the kids to play with there and even some little cousins! Here's Grace with an aunt (to me) and Grandmother (to her).

Goodbye for now. I hope you'll come again next year. All doors are made festive with these couplet verses wishing good fortune and money over the next year!