Party Girl

Lots of running around last weekend as Wynn had two kids' parties to attend! First was her friend Tessa's birthday Saturday night - at the Too Cool Cooking School with a bunch of her classmates ... great concept; the kids make their own dinner during a 2-hour party (while the parents can sneak off to the coffee shop)

Sunday night we continued our annual Chinese New Year tradition of having a dinner and playtime with the other Twin Cities families we were in China with for our kids' adoptions. Wynn and Jenna, the Guanxi Girls, continue to be smart, outgoing, and a bit wacky. Josh, from Anhui, loves to talk and have fun too - just not as rambunctious as the girls...

Up a Wall

Today Wynn's school was closed on account of Chinese New Year, so the family of one of her classmates, Dylan, chose today for his 7th birthday party.

 

 

Dylan likes rock climbing. A LOT. Such that he's a regular at the "pinnacle" of the Bloomington, MN REI store.  And he's pretty darned good at it, from what we saw. 

The tall glass atrium on the right side of the building houses the rock walls...

That teeny little person checking out the bases of the rock walls is Wynn. The one on the left is 55 feet tall; the one on the right about 40.

This is a rock-climbing birthday party!  Mandatory safety briefing!

A little dubious...  at least she was paying attention :)

Dylan does a demonstration.  The crowd goes silent in rapt attention...  Wynn starts to get the idea she might like to do this.  The kids swarm the gear station & all want to get suited up to climb...

Special harness, special shoes.  Love how she's focused while the kids are racing around her.

Tightening & knotting, learning the signals with the belayer

And up she goes.  "I was kind of scared," she said.  "Why did you keep climbing?" I asked. "Because I really wanted to know I could do it."

That's her about 3/4 of the way up...  way beyond what I was guessing she would have done.  (Double click the photo to enlarge)

At this point all the other kids had stopped whatever they were doing and were chanting "GO WYNN! GO WYNN!"  The parents were all beaming.  I was scrambling to text-message Ann what was going on while taking pictures...

 

And with one last push over that scary negative space by her knees, she stood up and rang the bell.

"Coming down was the hardest part," she said.

Someone surprised herself today & learned a valuable lesson about how to handle her fear!

Chinese New Year gala 2013 - Yinghua Academy

Chinese New Year is becoming such an important part of our family's life, and as Wynn gets bigger and more involved at her school, we learn about and adopt more Chinese traditions.

A tradition at Yinghua Academy is the annual New Year's gala, where each class performs - it's almost 3 hours long, with over 500 kids on stage at some point - in costume no less, and all the families in attendance.

Here are some photos from last night's performance!

We had two different Dragon dances during the show!

The entire 3rd-grade on stage in synchronized martial arts

Here's our girl!

This is Wynn's homeroom teacher - who's an AMAZING vocal talent.  She did a big solo number last year, too, and brought down the house!

Two lions dancing for us this year to close the show!

Winter Carnival Snow Sculptures

Living next to the State Fairgrounds is great - when events are taking place we're only moments away.  The St. Paul Winter Carnival is underway now, and they've had truckloads of snow brought onto Machinery Hill at the Fairgrounds for their annual snow-sculpting contest.  It was a pleasant night, so we wandered over after dinner:

Dozens of sculptures - most of them intact but there were a couple that fell apart in today's 38-degree weather...

Of course, Wynn liked the dragon.

Great detail and craftsmanship on this one!  Wynn is taking piano lessons weekly after school...

Work is still underway - this looks like it'll be a Vulcan palace when completed. They were giving fire-truck rides around the Fairgrounds this weekend; we could hear the siren going off every so often during the snowstorm...

I think this was a Far Side cartoon...

They had a big snow maze set up, and she had a blast running around inside that.

What a charmed life she leads!

She *still* really likes congee

Now that we live in the middle of the Twin Cities, it's a lot easier to try new restaurants.  Last night we stopped at Que Nha on University Avenue.  A light-rail station is literally just outside their front door & this is exactly the kind of business that will get all sorts of traffic when the trains start running.  A family-run, family-friendly place ... clean, well-decorated, with fast service.  We'd told Wynn that they had congee on the menu, and that's all she wanted to talk about on our short drive there...

This serving bowl is about 2/3 of a gallon...  just beautiful; we haven't seen so much meat in a serving of congee anywhere else on our travels.  Really a lovely sight & smell to behold on a gray, windy, cold day like yesterday.

Wynn had three bowls - I had one as well - and we still had plenty left over for breakfast today!

Happy 7th Birthday!

It's really difficult to have a birthday right after Christmas and right before Chinese New Year.  But a girl's gotta get presents.  Thankfully she's genuinely grateful.  (We squirreled away the My Little Pony trainset...)

Cupcakes from ... Cupcake, on University Avenue.  They're mighty good.

I can't believe Wynn has been part of our lives for 5-1/2 years now.  But here she is, already becoming a Big Kid.

 

Post-Xmas Pictures 2012

Visited her grandparents in Burnsville today; on the way back we stopped by the airport to watch airplanes for a while, and she got her picture taken at one of the holiday displays they have there.

And we had lunch at Culver's in West St. Paul, next to Lowe's where we got paint to do our living room over Xmas break.  She's showing off her Oreo ice cream cake she got as part of her kids' meal!  (She needed a little help to finish it.)