Our Chinese New Year 2009 Celebration!

This past Sunday, we celebrated Chinese New Year 2009 with a day of food, fun, red envelops, and family! The day started off with the girls getting a red envelope from us along with a amazing Chinese children animated DVD, "The Panda & The Magic Serpent". Both Francesca and Annabelle had such a great time and just loved all the celebration activities we had planned ~ all day long. Coming from a very traditional Italian family...if you told me a few years ago that one of our important holidays would be Chinese New Year, I would have said you were crazy, but just look at us now! Since coming home with Francesca back in November 2005, we have been celebrating CNY in a BIG WAY! Not only is it important to our girls but it is also very important to us.

The Food...as always ~ the menu chosen was chosen by Francesca!

The main dish...Fettuccine Alfredo

My grandmother's famous Roasted Tomatoes

and Homemade Garlic Parmesan Cheese Bread



Now here's is all the fun...eating the meal of the girls' choice

(do you think they enjoyed it!)





Here are a few of the Chinese decorations that we used this year in order to add to our celebration!

(the tea set and jade chopsticks were purchased on during our last journey to China for our Annabelle back in October 2008 in Henan. And the Asian style fountain was a gift from my sister this past Christmas!)

(the pottery tea set was purchased during our journey for Francesca in 2005 in Nanchang and the abstract tea pot was purchased in Henan when traveling for Annabelle. Both are very special pieces for they were each purchased in the province where each of our daughters are from. And my lucky bamboo plant was a gift from my oldest daughter, Francesca this past summer after receiving our referral for Annabelle.)



This masterpiece was actually created by Francesca last year. She is just so very proud of it and so are we.

(in my opinion, she did a great job!)

and last but not least...a few final photo of our oldest, Francesca. Per her request ~ these photos needed to be posted!

We hope you all had a very great and memorable Chinese New Year celebration for 2009! To all of our family & friends throughout this wonderful adoption community...We love you all so very much and Here's to The Year of the Ox!