Reflections on Diversity

I love Chinese New Year. It's such a fun holiday - great food, a focus on family time, fireworks - all the makings of a fantastic celebration!

This year we had the joy of hosting our local Chinese New Year's party at CenterPoint. I'm so grateful to have a church facility that's open to gatherings like this! It's a wonderful way to serve and connect with our community.

The party was a blast as always. The decorations were super festive. The food was amazing. The company was delightful. We learned about Chinese New Year traditions, exchanged red envelopes, made Year of the Rooster crafts, and clapped along with the dragon parade.

We also had the joy of welcoming a dozen people from our community who participate in the Conversation Cafe conversational English club at church. It was so fun to blend together our adoptive family friends and our learning-English friends together in one big party.

Chinese New Year has been a super special holiday to me for a while, and this year my reflections were filled with a special gratitude.

As our nation grapples with the threat of bigotry and prejudice becoming an accepted part of our national identity, I hold gatherings like this precious. We crossed cultural, racial, and religious boundaries. We welcomed folks born in the U.S., China, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, and Mexico. We learned from each other, ate together, laughed together, and just enjoyed each other. I don't want to over-spiritualize Panda Express takeout and $50 worth of fireworks, but I think there's something really special about crossing lines and coming together to celebrate like this.

We are a family of blended heritage. We have a daughter from a Muslim-majority country and one from a Socialist nation. We don't look the same, but are bonded by love and respect and devotion to each other.

And let's never forget that, like our relationship with God, our girls came to us with nothing to offer. We loved them and they responded to that love - we didn't ask that they prove their worthiness or their affiliation to our cause or their adherence to our religion.

We love because he first loved us.

1 John 4:19

Gathering together over takeout this weekend was, to me, a profound celebration of what is precious and how I want my life, my family, my church, my community, and my nation to be defined.

Also, kudos to Sam for finding something he actually wanted to eat at the party and for making it "Chinese" by eating with chopsticks.

Chinese New Year Party!

by WanYing

Chinese New Year you can take pictures of people and you can put these, like, heads on that are like dragon tops heads and then there's like this little thing that you can see your face and there's holes in the dragon and you can't see through them.

This is me. I have the red horn on top of my head and my sister is the one with the red beard and my brother is the one that has the green top hair. On the mouth he has the blue tongue part.

This is my whole family. My mom's the one with the green jacket. My brother is the one with the blue shirt. And my sister is the one with the red scarf. And then my dad is the one that has a white shirt on. And I am the one that has the dress that has a lot of stuff on it and has brownish-blackish hair. I have the flower pants that are blue flowers and in the middle of the flowers there's white and then there's dots on them.

This is me and my sister drawing pictures and we're making dragons. This is the ram year and that's my brother with the blue shirt's year and my friend Kylee which is standing right in the middle of us.

There's 12 different kinds of animals.

This is my sister holding up her dragon

This is me with my dragon and I'm flying him

At the Chinese New Year Party we have a parade and everybody gets to pick something and one is with a huge dragon head and people get to be behind the dragon and stand there and hold up the sheet that's behind him.

And there also also hats and these things that you hold by the sticks and then twist it and they sound like drums sort of.

And we make a lot of noise to scare away the dragons.

I am one of the dragons. My friend is, too. She is the front of the dragon. I'm behind her and I hold up the sheet and we go around the area and we do the stuff that we're supposed to do. You make the sound if you're one of the persons that use the sound. But if you're not one of those guys you're doing a dragon or you're waving this thing in a big circle - it's a ribbon on a stick that you wave around in a big circle.

This is me with a hat on looking behind my friend because my mom wanted to take a picture of me but she kept walking so I had to look behind me and walk.

I like Chinese New Year. You get envelopes that have a Chinese coin in it and three White Rabbit candies and you also get chocolate coins.

Happy New Year!

Chinese New Year!

Ridiculously tardy photos?  Yes.  But they're still ridiculously adorable even if the Lunar New Year was a full two months ago!

This year at the annual gathering of people in our general vicinity with kiddos from China we had a new addition to the party - a lunar new year animal story play.  It was... energetic.  And Ben played a very compelling Chinese Emperor.

WanYing (the cat) rides her bro (the ox) across the river

Cat, Ox, and Rat cross the river

The whole fabulous cast

Parade time! Our girls' favorite part of the evening

Here comes WanYing the dragon butt

This is why you see so few photos of Ben

Even when you can only see a sliver of his face, he manages to make the photo "unique".  Sigh.

Gung hay fat choy and hope that your Lunar New Year started as happily as ours did!

Gōng Xǐ Fā Cái

Happy New Year! I don't know about you, but this year an extra chance to start new feels especially freeing. And who can argue with a new beginning dressed in vibrant red, filled with Chinese food, brimming with dragons, and ending in fireworks?!? The Chinese sure know how to start the year off right.

Note Ben's signature crossed eyes.  I didn't notice this when I took the picture... sneaky little guy

Our littlest dragon

WanYing loved the buns.  A lot.

Sasha concentrates on her dragon coloring with trademark tongue out

Sasha displays her finished dragon

Sam is very reasonably concerned about WanYing's "help" with the scissors

WanYing's finished dragon (mostly the girls just liked playing "ninja" with the sticks)

Dragon parade time! Ben is such a good sport (this is my favorite part of the evening)

Once again, Sam is a Lion Butt

WanYing definitely enjoyed her first dragon parade

Now for Sam's favorite part - the hóng bāo (red envelopes filled with money)

Happy New Year everybody!

Giving Back

We are so grateful to our daughters' homelands for giving them life, nurturing them for their first two years, and providing our whole family with a sense of identity and connection that stretches well beyond the boarders of our town or even our nation.  It's tough to maintain that connection through the hectic months and years - we're so blessed to be able to maintain relationships with some of Sasha's baby house mates from Kazakhstan and forge new relationships with other China adoptive families in the area, but, well, if you know anything about our family you know that we're always looking for more :)

So, over the past couple of weeks we've been researching charities that work in the girls' birth areas and are so excited that we have found two nutrition projects and two sponsorship projects to bless other kiddos the way our gals have been blessed!

Here's a quick run-down of the charities we recently started supporting.  I share these for two reasons:

1. These are great projects and well worth anyone's consideration when looking for charities to support
2. To encourage adoptive parents that with a little research you can probably find groups to support that work in your kid's area of birth.  It's a really special thing to us to know that we can affect positive change in little lives just like Sasha and WanYing's and for us having a monthly donation going to these great groups keeps us remembering and praying for all those still waiting.  You can stay involved, even from the other side of the world!

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SPOON Foundation is conducting really cool nutrition research, education, and support all over Kazakhstan. They provide supplements, but even more importantly are working with the Kazakhstani government to change legislation and nutrition guidelines to provide healthy nutrition to all kiddos in institutions.

SPOON was started by a Kaz adoptive mommy who saw the need and effects of malnutrition firsthand in the Kazakhstani baby houses and decided upon her return home with her first child to do something about it.  Oh, and they work in Botakoz, Sasha's babyhouse :)

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We sponsor a little boy just about Sam's age through SOS Villages Kazakhstan. SOS Villages has a children's home in Temirtau, Sasha's birthplace, to protect and care for vulnerable children - kids whose parents are either temporarily or permanently unable to care for them. Temirtau is a poor, heavily industrial area, with all of the social issues that generally accompany, and we love being a little part of providing this young man with a safe, healthy, loving environment like every kid deserves.

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Love Without Boundaries is a charity that works in China and they have a nutrition project in Shangrao, WanYing's SWI. We know that WanYing benefited from this project and even got the cutest little baby photo of WanYing from them after we returned home from China, and we love supporting a program that helped our little one so much.

Love Without Boundaries was started by a group of China adoptive parents who wanted to give back to the country that had given them so much, and we are so glad to be able to support their efforts.

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And lastly, we also are privileged to sponsor foster care for a baby girl through Adopchina, the organization through which our sweet (new) friend Laura sponsored WanYing. Adopchina is based in Spain, but through my highly advanced (and mostly forgotten) college Spanish and the miracles of Google Translate we have succeeded in communicating well enough to sponsor a child of our own in WanYing's SWI. Holt also sponsors kiddos in WanYing's SWI, if you're looking to sponsor a Shangrao kiddo and have less of an appetite for comical translation errors than we do :)

Utah Valley China Kiddos

Yesterday we had a chance to hang out with several other area families with kiddos from China.  It was great!  It's such a blessing to have places where our crazy bio-Kaz-Chinese family tapestry is normal and where we can enjoy our diversity rather than always explaining it.  Don't get me wrong, it's a privilege to get to share our family story... but every once in a while it's nice to not have to explain.  Thank heavens for the community of adoption.

We had a lovely evening of burgers and dogs and flag football (a first for the boys!), combined with story-sharing, encouragement, tips-and-tricks, and a celebration of our astounding kiddos, all enjoyed among Utah's beauty.

Sigh.  I do so love these cuties!

The boys give flag football a try

WanYing loves getting piggyback rides from her big bro

And to all a good night.

Chinese Translations Gone Awry

We've been home just over a month now from our epic journey to China and I just finished editing and labeling our photos. It was quite the job, especially coupled with a new kiddo and a new job :)

While in China, we took pains to capture our very favorite informational signs. The meaning is (usually) clear... the translation, not so much.

Hope you enjoy these as much as we did!

"If you have or brain disease, please ascend the great wall according to your capability." Ben made it all the way up our section of the Great Wall, so I guess he's clear.

"Welcome for shooting but please don't sit on it" from a gelato stand near the Big Buddha in Hong Kong.  It's weird, you'd think that shooting the cute little ice cream cone would actually be more damaging than sitting on it.

"Be careful of floor slide" from our hotel bathroom in Guangzhou

A "Sleep pig in car" bumper sticker in Beijing.  The best part about this one is that it's actually a comedic play on "Baby on board" although I'm guessing that it gains greater oddity with translation

From the Great Wall (it was rife with comedy), "Please keep off the iron tower during thunderstorms."
Apparently you're welcome to climb the rickety radio tower as long as it's not raining.

Another from the Great Wall, "Speaking cellphone is strictly prohibited when thunderstorm."  It's just one of those things you wouldn't think you'd need to warn people about, especially not with a sign screwed into a millennial-old structure.

The Guangzhou park was full of interesting signage.  Much as I tried to persuade them, the kids remained unconvinced that the "Lovely fruit worm pulley" sounded fun.

More park directions.  My favorite part is, "Children younger than five years old and cowards should be accompanied with adults."

"Dangerous at the bank please keep the danger away"  Yes, keep it far, far away.

From another park in Guangzhou (we think these were meant to be cute):  "Grass smiling, please keep off"

From the same park, "The grass offer you green.  You should return them love" (I want this one for my gardens at home!)

Ok, admittedly, this one isn't so funny in translation, it's just the idea that next to the bunny hutch it says, "For your safety, please keep away"

Again, not the translation that makes me smile, it's the fact that the tiger pit at the Safari Zoo has a rescue ladder.  Good luck with that if you find yourself needing it.

Sam takes the "Care for the step" sign to heart and provides it some tender TLC

And, my absolute favorite, "One-way walk, do not retrograde"