Asher's Birthday and February Activities

Asher turned four this week. He had been counting down the days at least since Elliott's birthday (about 40 days earlier). All of the boys woke up early and were ready to open presents. For his birthday breakfast he picked cereal and then for dinner we did a pizza night on Friday with the Abel family and then spaghetti and meatballs on Saturday. The rest of the day we just played games with him and tried to do the activities that he enjoys the most.

Here he is getting ready to open his presents.

And here he is ready to play with them.

Julia made his cake this year. He said he wanted a dinosaur one, which was funny because his cousin Jonathan who is only a few days older also did a dinosaur cake. We didn't show any pictures of that one or mention it at all, but he just came to the same idea.

Here is Julia adding the lava frosting to the volcano cake part.

The final product.

Rebecca and I were talking some this week about Asher's personality. He seems to have a lot of the characteristics of our other children, but in a unique mixture. He is always very smiley and likes to laugh and joke around. If he sees someone else laughing about something in a movie or a conversation at the table, he will say "that is funny" and start laughing too even if he doesn't understand what he is laughing about. He likes sports a lot and to run around. One of his favorite times of the day is getting to play basketball on a door hoop with his brother Ethan right before naps. He will miss that a lot when Ethan goes back to school full time in a few days. He loves hugs and snuggling with everyone and really enjoys listening to books. He is also great at playing on his own and could spend hours doing train tracks, dinosaurs, or hot wheels. It is pretty quiet lots of the time when all the other kids are off at school and he is just playing by himself.

A few other things for February so far...

Christian did his wax museum report. He was Sir Isaac Newton. He enjoyed learning all about him. This year they just did their reports virtually. Aunt Tianna helped him come up with this great costume!

This past week and a half we have had a ton of snow. We went from nothing on the ground at all last Thursday to well over a foot in some places. It has been a pain to get out an shovel almost every single day, but the children have been a huge help with that. I am thinking that our snow for this year just came all at once and it will start warming up pretty soon.

Here we are walking to church in the snow.

And then yesterday we got to go to the Friend to Friend event. It was really good! Rebecca organized it so the primary all came to watch it together in the gym at our church building. All the kids brought pillows and blankets and Rebecca and the primary presidency brought paper, pencils/crayons, and lots of snacks. The program was great. It was the right level of fun activities and inspirational messages. Rebecca and I both thought it was great, not just for our children, but us too. If you want to watch it, here is a link for it (https://youtu.be/kFrBfJKng_Y).

And here is a picture of all of the primary kids in the gym.

Chinese New Year

We had a fun time celebrating the Chinese New Year this weekend. We started off by making steamed buns. I am usually the one to make these, but this time it was a joint effort with everyone in the family doing a part. I thought they turned out really well. The two types that we do most often are cheese filled and taro filled. This time we burnt the taro though, so we actually used a white sweet potato with purple food coloring. 

While those were rising, we also ate some Dan Bings (scrambled up egg fried with a tortilla on top, then rolled up and cut into bite sized pieces. They are super simple, but really yummy. Here is a picture from the internet of them. We also had some time to watch a lion dance video and look at some of our pictures from our trip to Taiwan two and a half years ago.

Our children played outside in the snow for a while after that. The past couple days it has snowed a ton and it is supposed to keep going for all next week. They spent about an hour building forts and then had an epic snowball fight. It was so intense that our neighbor even came over to watch.

Then we played a few Chinese games. We modified one to use pillows instead of bean bags and chairs instead of drawing squares on the floor. This was a pretty simple one where you throw your pillow onto a chair, then the second person goes. If their pillow lands on the same chair, they get two points and you get zero. If theirs lands on the other chair, you both get one point. And if someone doesn't have a pillow on a chair, that person just gets zero and the other person gets one point. We played to 10 and Julia was the big winner. We also played another one with dropping pennies and trying to get yours to land on someone else's. 

The favorite part of the day for our children was when they got the Hong Baos (Red Envelopes). For dinner we had some pot stickers, sticky rice, tofu, and some other sides. 

We got to talk on zoom with my parents and some of my siblings after that. That was especially fitting since one of my siblings and his family live in Hong Kong (where they actually celebrate the Chinese New Year) and another of my siblings and her family live Japan (where they celebrate the Lunar New Year).

We finished the night by watching the new Mulan again.

I think we all wish that the new Mulan had some of the parts that the cartoon one had (sad not to see Mushu in in), but the new story is also pretty good.

It is exciting to think that next year we will be in Taiwan to celebrate the Chinese New Year. That will be toward the start of our seven month stay there.

Elliott Makes it to the Top

Elliott made it to the top of the rope climb and wanted to make sure I got an updated video of him doing it on the blog. Here he is: