Updates below

I still have a lot to add, but more entries are below. I just wanted to stick them near the date where the event took place!

This is pretty much indicative of the state of affairs at our house right now!

Fortune Cookies

At one point the Japanese must have said, fish head and rice and pickles must not go over well with the American population.

Smart people. The quote is from a New York Times article about the origin of Chinese fortune cookies. The funny thing about those cookies is that they don't have them in China, which never made much sense. Now it seems, Yasuko Nakamachi has traced their origins to Japan. The majority of people thought they were started by the Chinese in their California restaurants in the early 1900's, I know I did. She says the Japanese realized their food wasn't as palatable to Americans as Westernized chop suey so they opened Chinese restaurants and that is how the cookies became intertwined with Chinese restaurants. Here is the article in case you are interested...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/dining/16fort.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th

Great Christmas Craft

This was the best thing to have around the weeks before Christmas -- any time the kids were looking for something to do, I could pull this off the top of the fridge (they just can't resist eating the candy off a "gingerbread" house.) The kids and neighbors had a great time adding decorations to the cottages, which is what Lindsay called them since they didn't have a pitched roof. Jason thought they were hideous (in the nicest way), but couldn't argue with the fact that it kept the kids mighty busy! One of my friends, who is actually the person who put the houses together, had a child younger than Dylan. That kid had every square inch of his house decorated and she had to make another! He's a craft monger and quite precocious in my book. We worked for weeks and this is as much coverage as we got.

Nine Days into the New Year!

Goodness! Here we are 9 days into the new year. I've got a gagillion events to post about, but first I have to find the floor of my house after Christmas and our ski trip and New Years and Lyvia's 2nd birthday. The new year is supposed to be a time for us to have new beginnings, but honestly I can't even think about that until I find the floor. There is also a tidal wave of things to now go upstairs and I'll create a new mountain of chaos up there once we drag it that direction. Add childcare and putting food into children's stomachs to my list and I'm not sure I'll be able to ever get through all this!

Thank goodness for Chinese New Year -- it seems to arrive about the time I have finally recovered from all the Fall activies. I might just spend Jan 1st until Chinese New Year thinking about how I'd like the new year to start, but give myself that extra time to straighten our house up and declutter the attic and closets. I just can't "perfom" (and I mean all that Mommy stuff) with the house in disarray.

Anyone else start decluttering in January? Drives me crazy that our powerfilled homeowners association only allows two community garage sales a year and they are during a time of year I could never actually pull things out that I am ready to part with. Even then I don't hold a garage sale. We just stick it all on the driveway and put a free sign up -- we've given away camcorders, furniture, cameras etc. The best part for us is that we don't have to pack it up and haul it to the local thrift store. Also, you know all the parts to a toy or electronic item aren't going to be lost when you hand them over to the new owners -- I can only imagine how much stuff is dumped by Goodwill since they can't possibly keep everything I've dumped in a bag or box organized. I've also used freecycle to get rid of things www.freecycle.org, but if I have a lot, it takes awhile to schedule the pickups.

I may have cleared and found a bit of floor space today -- I better go defend it from the children!