CNY 2010, CELEBRATING THE TIGER

Last Sunday we drove (a long way) to Warminster to celebrate CNY with other adoptive families, including several of our closest friends and other Yunnan families.

Alice wasn't looking forward to the lion dance, we went to see it beforehand and met the dancers, it didn't help much. In previous years she's been OK, even up close, but not this year, this year she had a death grip on me, went rigid and shook. After the dance she was quite happy to get up close to the empty head and she's also quite happy to talk about everything that went on!

We watched several Chinese styled dances and I think that we might be driving over the bridge to England for Chinese dance lessons when Alice is a little older! She was VERY keen on the dances she watched. She was very happy to make a Tiger mask with stickers and crayons - she painted another at school yesterday.

She was very proud to wear her qipao and is delighted to tell anyone about it or share this photo. She will definitely be wearing one more often. This is yet another that I bought on her adoption trip in Guangzhou, there are still a few more in the cupboard but she's getting through the sizes more quickly than I'd anticipated!

It's the first time we've been to this sort of gathering where Alice has obviously identified that other children there are Chinese and also adopted, she was happy to make this link and has referred to it several times in the past week. So even though it was a very long way (nearly 2 hours in each direction) we had lots of fun but even more crucially it was important to Alice's sense of identity and she's already looking forward to the Annual (national) Reunion next month (me too)!!