The Chinese New Year is Upon Us

So, even though Valentine's Day is right around the corner (which is a holiday my wife and I choose not to celebrate, but Lilah Rose and I use as an excuse to go to dinner together) this week is all about the Chinese New Year.  This is an exceptional week because, not only is Lilah celebrating Chinese New Year at school, but she is also doing crafts at home and having Chinese inspired dinners all week (my wife is a sucker for a good theme.)  Last night, she and Lilah made a paper Lion of red to scare off the Nain.  The concept of the Nain was most interesting to me because Detroit has a local, French, legend of something called the Nain Rouge which translates to "Red Dwarf" and he is said to bring around evil.  The Chinese Nain is a demon who brings bad luck and is, drum roll, afraid of the color red.  Odd, no?

Lilah, for her craft last night, was given options as to what animal she would like to make and, though it wasn't one of the choices, was very insistent on "Dinosaur, RAWR!"  I'm not entirely sure how my wife did it, but she finally got Lilah to agree on making a lion.  I suppose, only in a few cases, she is made of sterner stuff than I because I would have just given in and let Lilah make a dinosaur (rawr.)  After all, if the Nain is afraid of big animals, I think the T-Rex may qualify.  I love when Lilah does crafts at home even more than when she does them at school.  She got this really cool bead set for Christmas and she loves to make necklaces with it for people who come over, but doesn't let them leave with their necklaces.  Then there is the other end of the spectrum where I got stuck yesterday.  Lilah had made me a necklace and that meant that I absolutely had to wear it.  I wore it through the day while we played, danced, talked and then took it off when she was napping.  The first thing Lilah noticed when she woke up was that I was not wearing my necklace.  The audacity!  She promptly found it and said, matter of factly, "you should wear this now."  Which I had to do.  And so, I wore it the rest of the evening as I played guitar, wrote, and even when I went out to shovel snow until eventually the string came loose and I nearly lost all my beads.  Lilah, for her part, thinks she has unlimited beads because my wife secretely removes them from their strings at night and puts them back in the bead box.  What it must be like to have everlasting supplies.

The Chinese New Year craft they are doing at school is to make a red chinese lantern.  They are going to be splitting it in two parts and did half today and will do the other half on Thursday.  Today's part of the activity consisted of taking shapes and dipping them in white paint to decorate the lanterns with.  I asked Lilah how she decorated hers and she said she didn't do it, so I hope that's just misinformation so that, when she shows me the finished project, I can say "Did you do that all in one day!" and she can convince me that she is some kind of child prodigy and/or super hero.

For those who want relationship advice, by the way, Ms. Jessica Schrader did a quick Q&A Profile on my wife and I - the link is here: http://ferndale.patch.com/articles/ferndale-valentines-day-daniel-and-al...

Although, I can't say I agree with her calling us a "cute couple" - I mean my wife sure is cute, but me?  I'll be back Thursday to talk about the finishing of the lantern (hopefully.)  Until then, (Insert clever sign off here.)