I went to Stefanie's class to celebrate Chinese New year. We showed all our pictures from the trips to China and also many of the things we bought, the pearls jade and papercuts. We read a book about a paperbutterfly and then the kids all made papercuts of a panda and pasted it onto red paper. The children were very interested and Stefanie loved being the center of attention.
Of course, there were lots of questions about "Stef's real mommy in china" Stefanie explained that we don't know who her birth mommy is or why she couldn't take care of any babies. When I told them that we don't know what her birthmommy looks like one of the kids said 'sort of like G-d', which I thought was a nice way of looking at it. I tried to explain to the kids that we call the china mommy the 'birth' or 'tummy' mommy because that is the mommy who grew Stef in her tummy, but that I am the 'real mommy forever'. On the way home Stef announced that she wanted to send a balloon to her china mommy. This was something we had talked about in the past but at that time stef wasn't interested ("why in the world would I want to let my balloon fly away?).She said that she wanted to send her chinamommy a balloon because it was CNY and she wanted her to be happy. She wanted her to know that she was happy that I was her mommy now and that she loved me. We bought a balloon. Stef wrote 'happy new year', signed her chinese name and we let it go. She says she hopes it makes it all the way to china. It was very sweet. She was then so tired from all the excitement of the day that she was a miserable beast all night; the mac and cheese wasn't cheesy enough, Jena was sitting in the exact spot she needed to sit in, the cookies were too crunchy etc. What happened to all that sweetness?!?
Happy Year of the Rat to all our China buddies and their Real Families!
