Happy Chinese New Year! Today Addy and I spent the day running errands, reading stories, baking together, and finishing up Valentines-we wanted to make sure we had everything done by the time my Mom got home because we knew she had some fun planned for us all in honor of today. She is so creative!

We had a lot of fun watching Mulan and participating in making dinner. Luke made orange chicken, Samantha and my mom made fried rice and my friend Chelsea and I made pot stickers. While we ate my Mom put on one of her favorite shows, and her inspiration for the nights activities-an episode of The Amazing Race Season 18 where they are in China. We each were randomly assigned a team, and we got to watch our characters do their best in different tasks. With a few of them, my Mom would pause the show and we had to do our own version of the task here at home. For example, on the show they had to search for all 12 of the Chinese zodiac signs on plaques, and then put them in order on a hanging ornament thing. So my Mom gave us about 2 minutes to do the same on a piece of paper. Luke kicked our butts and got 11 out of 12 correct! Chelsea was a close second with 10. In another task they had to use hammers to pound out a traditional Chinese candy. My amazing Mom then brought out 2 trays of homemade peanut brittle and we all had to race to hammer it into good chips the best and the fastest. Lets be real, my pieces were the best, but I have to admit that Chelsea did finish first haha.

In the end, we combined our own scores with the scores of the team who represented us on the show. Once again, Luke won hands down and got to enjoy his reward of some yummy Pocky snacks. Of course, he shared with us. We ended the festivities by reading about our zodiacs [I for example am a dragon.]

It was so fun and I am so glad we are here to enjoy it! A very Happy Chinese New Year to all of you!