Today and Tomorrow

It snowed today. Granted, it melted by afternoon, but, still, it was snow. Baba, Emma, Matthew, and I went out in the morning before school for half an hour to, you know, hang about in the whiteness. It was the sort of snow we've had before - it's pretty while unscathed, and ugly when trodden on. The moment you put a boot in, the dirt and grass and wet filth is unearthed. Our snow here is pa-the-tic. Nevertheless, it was snow. Unlike depicted in animations, your footprints don't appear, then fade away by replacement snow. They stayed, and they were horrid. Even so, it was snow.

Emma attempted to make a snowman (chunky failure) while Baba had a weak snowball fight with a Chinese boy, about seven or eight years old. 

Today was pretty uneventful.

Tomorrow shall be very eventful, being the first day of the great Chinese holiday I was talking about in an earlier post - CHINESE NEW YEAR! HOORAY!! We are looking hopefully forward to endless days of fireworks and cheerful dinners of dumplings and all that traditional glee that this festival brings to this ancient country. Baba and Mom are anticipating nights of no rest, as Emma and Jen are. Fireworks don't affect me much, though. Last year, I fell asleep, right on the couch in the living room, in the middle of a firework show. Yet another of my exceptional abilities.

As of February 6th, we've watched two boys named James (2) and Nathaniel (1) (see the Children tab for more information) for ten days, over the holiday. How they will react to the fireworks, I'm not sure. I expect that they have SOME knowledge on fireworks. Hopefully they aren't like Matthew. Last year, he panicked and cried and Mom had to go into the bathroom/laundry room of the apartment, where the most privacy was. That was in 2012, before we move from fifth floor heights to sixteenth floor heights in March. Matthew has been pretty mellow about the fireworks he's heard recently (they're a regular occurrence in Xi'an, unfortunately), so we hope he'll have the same opinion towards the "boom booms", as he calls them, when they come in the huge bursts that they most certainly will.

~Abby