snow day | here i am

Happy Chinese New Year! Over 1.3 billion people in China and millions of people around the world, including us, celebrated the first day of the Chinese New Year today. Gong Xi Fa Cai is a traditional Chinese New Year greeting that means “wishing you prosperity” in Mandarin. This is the year of the snake, and is meant for steady progress and attention to detail. Might be a challenge for me!

April and Steve arrived today with their girls and we wandered thru Amsterdam’s small Chinatown and then towards the Bijenkorf to catch the tale end of the dragon dance.

I can’t believe we’ve been living in Holland for 200 days already! I’m very happy to have our family friends with us for two weeks. They came with all kinds of goodies from home and with gifts and greetings from our friends and neighbors. Thank you Brenda for all the Valentine’s day candies. Thank you Val for the beautifully, handmade scarves and warm socks for the kids, and shirt for Christian. You all are so thoughtful! And thanks A&S for coming all this way to enjoy Europe with us! We’re so glad you’re here and are going to enjoy every (freezing cold) minute with you!

Happy Chinese New Year, friends!!

Last night at around 10 pm we received a text from the kids school saying school was cancelled due to the expected weather. I was excited!

I actually like a change in my routine and actually enjoy my kids (most of the time!!) and was hoping it would really snow so that we could all play in it. My wish came true.

We all slept in and awoke without alarm clocks. I made a yummy breakfast scramble with bacon and cheese and toast for all of us. And then we headed outside to play and build snowballs and Fred – our snowman.

We haven’t been to the snow in quite awhile and it was a real treat for us. We all were laughing and playing with it for quite awhile. There is something very calming about the snow that I love. None of us complained about being cold or wet either, which was a surprise. I guess we were having too much fun to think about those things.

Afterwards, Juliana and I baked cupcakes and I made a pot of chicken noodle soup for lunch. We had a lazy, indoor day which was perfect!!

I always have wanted to watch a movie in the middle of the day and I never do because I can’t sit still and usually have a to do list I can’t ignore. But today I finally chose the movie as my to do… What a treat! I watched The Holiday after some friends said they loved it. It was cute!

And then finally at 6pm I got dressed for the day so we could join some friends for dinner. Date night was really nice and I enjoyed the adult conversation, drinks and delicious food.

Life is good!! And the snow day was pretty awesome!