December 1st: Lantern Light Festival

For the last several years I've tried to participate in December Daily, where I blog every day in December.  It's nice to record daily life sometimes, and there's certainly a lot of activities to write about in December!  I've been journaling daily in December so far but I'm just now getting around to posting. 

For the first day of our Advent activities we went to a new festival, the Lantern Light Festival!  It’s the first year for this event so I was really curious. We really enjoyed it!  The kids got to spend as much time as they wanted on the inflatables, and they got to ride animatronic dragons.  It wasn’t busy so there weren’t any lines.  They had mini-golf, a Forbidden City maze and mining for emeralds.  The mining was my favorite!  We had a blast sorting through the rocks later and trying to identify them.  Serenity’s favorite was the rose quartz, DZ picked obsidian, and Maia picked a green and black rock that may be an emerald. 

The lanterns were absolutely beautiful.  I tried to take pictures but they don’t do it justice.  I loved the giant dragon, which looked a lot like our Halloween dragon according to the kids =) 

They had acrobats from China that did totally amazing things.  I think the most adorable part of the night was watching the kids work out their own acrobatic show after they were mesmerized by the show.  Maia was so good.  She’s growing up so much recently.  She held hands with Serenity and just did as she was asked so easily.  We can definitely start going more places =) 

Dragon Rider =)

Unlimited inflatables = happy kids

Eric's Fav

Identifying the rocks we found while mining

Earlier in the day Maia and I got to go with Donovan on his school field trip to the Jenks Aquarium.  The pufferfish still loves Maia, and she loves her =)  I don’t know how she decided that she wanted to see the pufferfish, but it’s pretty cute.  I swear, the fish turned her face to the camera with what looks like a big smile, and swam that way the length of the tank so she could take good pictures.  Donovan and his friend Andrew walked around with us.  He’s been playing football a lot lately with Andrew, Joseph, and sometimes Jack so he was really excited that Andrew was his buddy at the aquarium.