A very American Chinese New Year

For our Vegetarian dish, Grace made jook with Taro fish balls, and various other ingredients all covered in Chicken fat. "That's as vegetarian as I get." She said. She has been cooking out of David Chang's cookbook (Korean American) and I have to say her Asian cooking had reached new levels of awesomeness. Ironically, in the past it was always her Western dishes that were better.
For decorations, other than the little lion head pictures I never took down from last year, I decided to write out the little Chinese words on red paper with Noah and Jonah. This means they scribbled in pencil (the ink and water went away after Jonah started dumping the water everywhere, and then I wrote the Chinese words over their scribbles in ink while they were distracted doing something else. We have a bunch of books, written for jook sings (by jook sings usually) which are supposed to be a guide for Chinese holidays. I thought such books would have all the words to write on one page. Well they had one character here and there but not the four in the row cool sounding ones. I had to scavenge and skim and find the easiest ones. Year year have fish I could write without looking. Happy New Year I had to look at sadly. I could not fing Gung Hei faht choy, but I did find an all inclusive one that I'll be using from now on. Five fortunes arrive at your door. Five. Wealth, Happiness, Longevity... I don't know there's five of them bam! all in a row saying just one word. That one went on paper.
Then I taped them up and let the kids tape up the little one word ones wherever they wanted, not caring about Fengshui placing or anything like that.
Hong Baos for the kids this morning. I feel like they didn't know what they were this year. That's weird cause last year they did.
Then we were going to go into to Chinatown at least today for a Lion Dance at a church. The plan was to take the Subway in. Well I would take Noah in and Jonah would stay home with Grace. But the subway is down. And actually as far as shoveling, we just pushed through, like just now. The problem with shoveling when you have little kids is you can't do too much at a time. And also, Noah was a great help with his little shovel, until we got closer to the street. I didn't want him to get him by the cars coming down the street, sliding really, and he simply would not just shovel the neighbors walkway that is enclosed and safe. So we went sledding down the sugar bowl a couple of times. Noah wouldn't walk for some reason so much carrying was involved then back inside while I helped shovel out again.
Supposedly we are supposed to get more Snow on Valentines day.
Well Gung Hei faht choi, sun tai geen hong! etc!