After 2 months, we have finally started to feel settled in at our new home in Knoxville. The city is laid out fairly well and it's small enough that we have figured out how to navigate our way around town. Well, we can get to the important places anyway, like the good restaurants, coffee shops, Costco, and the Chinese market. The holidays and the entire year of 2014 went by in a flash. As we share with you some pictures from our holiday celebrations this year, we also have two big announcements to share that are going to change our lives drastically in 2015.
1. Our family is growing by one little baby girl next June! We are so excited to bring Baby Robinson #2 into our lives. The pregnancy was a little rough for the first trimester, as I battled 4 weeks of daily "morning" sickness, which contrary to its name, lasted the entire day.
2. Christian is fulfilling his dream of opening an indoor climbing gym! With the generous help of our family and friends, we are proud founders and owners of Onsight Rock Gym in Knoxville, TN. We hope to open our doors to the community in late fall of 2015. We are so ecstatic about this amazing opportunity to bring a climbing gym to Knoxville. It's an awesome project to be a part of, so stay tuned for updates from us!
Thanksgiving
Turkey Day 2014 was celebrated in our new home in Knoxville. My parents and my brother, Devin, made the long trip into town for the long weekend since I was working in the hospital on several of the days. As with most celebrations or any type of family gathering in our culture, the focus was on food. I made my first "Chinese turkey", with very vague instructions from my mother, who never follows a recipe when she cooks. This makes trying to learn how to make any traditional Chinese dish extremely challenging. "Just add enough soy sauce until it looks right", she tells me. So after adding a random assortment of spices and sauces, my turkey "looked right" and I slid it into the oven. Amazingly enough, and purely by luck, it turned out to be delicious. My experimentation with Chinese cuisine shall continue. I spent the weekend working shifts and spending as much time as possible with my family. We were able to see some sights around town, attend the annual Fantasy of Trees Festival, and do a quick visit to the Obed.
Christmas
After working over Thanksgiving, I was given a week off, so we decided to spend Christmas in St. Louis. Before leaving town, we had to the obligatory visit to sit on Santa's lap at the mall. Micah was much more enthusiastic about this visit than he was last year. Of course, he a very important request for the man in the red suit this year. He wanted a special gift for being a good boy. He wanted a "horse bear". What a horse bear actually is and where he came up with the idea is beyond me, but he has been persistently asking for this gift for several months. His best bud, Riley, joined us for the big day, and was much less excited about sitting on Santa's lap. She just wanted to hug and kiss on Micah instead. Thanks to Micah's help, Riley bravely made it on Santa's lap with only a few tears this year. We finished off the afternoon with a train ride and two happy children, excited for Christmas Day to come!
Christian and I also decided to get our Christmas tree from a true tree farm this year. Little did I know, my husband's dream is own a Christmas tree farm. That project will have to wait a few years, unfortunately.
When we were planning this trip back "home" to St. Louis, I knew it was going to be a week with a jam-packed agenda. The majority of my extended family decided to all make it to St. Louis for the same week, so there was a lot of family obligations. Each gathering filled the table with 12 or more people and three times as much food. We spent the evenings playing complicated Chinese card games, and of course, eating some more. We did our best to see friends in town, but unfortunately we didn't quite make the rounds to see everyone. Despite all the craziness and running around town, Christmas Day was magical for one special little boy. After discovering that Santa ate all of his homemade "chocolate almond banana cookies" the next morning, he was ecstatic about opening up his presents from Santa and hoping to find his "horse bear". We let him dig through stockings while we waited for everyone else to wake up. Finally, at a more decent hour of the morning, everyone gathered in the living room and we spent the next few hours digging through the seemingly endless mountain of gift boxes and bags. Micah's face lit up as he saw his "horse bear" - a horse pillow pet that has his name sewn on to the strap. Mission Horse Bear accomplished.
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| Gingerbread house construction with Lao Ye |
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| "One M&M on the house, one M&M in my mouth" |
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| Strumming |
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| Dumpling skin rolling frenzy! |
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| Micah's choice of cookies for Santa - Chocolate almond banana cookies |
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| "Yes! I got a chocolate!" |
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| Merry Christmas! |
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| The horse bear is revealed! |
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| Micah's new pillow |
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| Micah continues to be afraid of anything that moves electronically. He went to high ground as soon as the train started moving on its own. |
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| Micah's new apron to help Mommy cook! |
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| Lao Lao and M, wearing his new raincoat |
Goodbye St. Louis! You will be missed!
New Years Eve
I would like to say that we partied hard into the night and brought in the new years with bells and whistles, but that just doesn't happen anymore when you add a toddler into the mix. These days, we have a hard time keeping our eyes open after 10pm. So instead, I decided to take on the challenging task of creating a traditional Chinese New Years dinner for my family and friends and made over 250 dumplings by hand. With the assistance of another vague "recipe" from my parents, I proceeded to mix together some random ingredients for the filling, roll out each dough disc, and pray that the dumplings turn out to be edible. After giving everyone a crash course on dumpling making, I put Christian in charge of quality control and set our friends loose to fill and shape each dumpling. Needless to say, we ended up with a wide array dumplings of different sizes and shapes, all made with the intent of looking like the traditional half moon shaped dumpling. As long as they didn't open up when cooked and turn into a pot a dumpling mush, I will call it a success. The 2nd part of this traditional dinner is the lucky peanut. During the dumpling making process, we place a peanut in a number of strategically chosen dumplings. Whomever eats one of these peanut filled dumplings during dinner is then granted good luck and prosperity for the new year. This tradition always brings a sense of excitement, anticipation, and friendly competition to the dinner table as everyone tries to eat as many peanut filled dumplings as possible. Dinner is usually filled with people randomly shouting "PEANUT!" with their mouths still full, then trying to pull out a piece of peanut before chewing up all the evidence. Of course, with a room full of climbers, luck and prosperity for the year usually translates to our climbing success for the upcoming year. There were definitely a few sad faces from those who were not lucky enough to find a peanut, despite the number of delicious dumplings they stuffed into their bellies.
