Papa's Birthday

A surprise on papa's birthday was a trip to a Chinese restaurant with Szechuan cuisine in our neighborhood.

After that we stopped at the playground of Mia's school for some playtime on a mild evening with a full moon. Then we had some homemade apple pie with vanilla ice cream and unwrapped the presents

Sleepover at Yilei's

We were invited to stay over at Yilei's place Saturday night and Mia was pretty excited about a sleepover.
Ella and Ben were excited as well and first Ella wanted to try out Ma's old shoes

Then after a nap they played in the playroom. Most of the toys were Ben's so the girls had to play with some big runs

After some lemon spaghetti Ella and Mia watched a Dora movie on an iPad

It got really wild later when everyone was in pajamas

The next morning after breakfast Mia wanted to ride on an old bike of Ben where Rex had taken of the training wheels for her the day before.

Chinese New Year

The teacher of Mia's preschool class had asked to help organize a little Chinese new year celebration in her class. So Ji and Mia got some rice cookies and filled some red envelopes for her classmates.

Ha offered to borrow a Chinese dress and Mia tried it out the evening before

She also tested if it was comfortable for dancing

Mia also wore it at school the next day

Bye, bye. Barbara

After many years in Washington DC cousin Barbara is moving to the Kinshasa, the capitol of Congo. We will certainly miss her.
We helped her doing the last minute clean up at her apartment

and dropped her at the airport.

Snow

Finally after three years we had some snow again. This morning everything was covered with about 2 cm (1 inch) of powdery snow and Mia's and Jacob's preschool class was canceled. Erika's school was two hours delayed and so the three of them could head to the little sledding hill in our neighborhood.

It wasn't quite the amount of snow we had in January of 2010 but it was enough to have some fun

Mia could also tried herself and she wasn't scared at all

Mama was a bit more cautious

Hopefully there will be some more snow this winter

Chloe's Birthday Party

This year Chloe had two birthday parties. One for her friends from the French school and one for her other friends here in the building. The second party was in the building's common room so the parents could have some wine and it was easy to get home

The highlight of course was the birthday cake.
Jacob and Mia made sure they had a good position next to the birthday girl

The German school

We have signed Mia up for some German preschool classes on Saturday morning that are offered by the German school for Washington DC. The class and especially the teacher were highly recommended by a colleague and this way Mia can interact with some other German speaking children her age.

The school is really big and we had some problems finding her classroom.

But luckily we had showed up 10 minuted early.
The teacher seemed really nice and Mia enjoyed the morning

There was also a little break on the playground

Since the weather was really nice we stayed a bit on the playground after the class was over and nearly got locked it. Luckily Mia's teacher who was cleaning up the room saved us