Happy New Year!!!

Happy (Chinese) New Year everyone! Gong She!!! Last night was the big party at church. New Year's for the Chinese is comparable to Christmas for Americans. There are always family gatherings, parties, traditions, gifts, and (of course!) lots of food. One of Andrew's aunties from church got Andrew the most adorable outfit for the big nite. She also got me the shirt you'll see me wearing as well.

I think he knew he was modeling here. :)

Check out the braided hair. Isn't that hilarious?!

The talent show was AWESOME! The youth did a couple of skits that turned out great. They wrote and acted them out all on their own. They are very talented and funny!
We only got pics from one of the skits though... how sad!

I don't even know how to explain this. Two brothers (Wesley and Allan) did this crazy yoyo fly through the air and land back on the string and go around their body thing. I think that's a fairly good explanation. It was pretty crazy looking.

Dr. Ho did a puppet show... sounds boring, right? It was a traditional Taiwanese puppet show though. He made the puppets do some amazing things. The pupets could move their fingers and tilt their heads! They were balancing dishes on long metal poles and beating each other up. It was really funny and a very cute, well written play as well. He had the adults and the little kids laughing so hard. I can't even understand Taiwanese and I was laughing too!

Dr. Tien, the chairman of our elder board, challenged Gabe and I this time. He asked Gabe to write out a few sentences of our feelings for everyone at church. We gave that to him and he exchanged it for a Taiwanese-translated copy for Gabe and a Mandarin-translated copy for me. It was SO hard, but we got up in front of everyone and recited (although not completely memorized) our message to the church. One of the high schoolers (Joseph) volunteered to translate for us (into English!) and did a great job. I'm sure that couldn't have been an easy task! I'm going to try to put a sound clip on of Gabe and I saying our messages.

I also did a short act with Alice... a follow-up from the Thanksgiving celebration. she's such a funny woman and comes up with some great ideas. The jacket I'm wearing is her's from her honeymoon! Isn't it beautiful?! I wish I had a pic of it closer up.
Andrew is at the age now that he can run around with the other kids and get away with getting into things that he's not supposed to. It's really cute!
He was so close to climbing up on stage so many times.
Happy New Year, Noah!!!

Andrew liked the feeling of his new clothes.
Andrew with his little buddy, Jonathan and hid mom, Irene.