We miss Nana

My August blog entries would be nowhere near complete without talking about Nana. We hosted a sweet Chinese High School student for a month while she attended summer school in St Paul. She worked her way into our hearts in a matter of minutes when she joined our family several weeks ago.

Now she's left us (sniff!), gone on to a boarding High School in a city about an hour and a half away, and our house feels so empty! We really miss her. We had so much fun talking with her and shopping with her. The girls couldn't get enough of her.

This is a picture of me, Nana, and Dawn at church:
Isn't she gorgeous?

It is absolutely amazing that in that month, I took not a single picture of Nana and my kids. Bad mama! Bad mama!! She was a natural at interacting with them, even after asserting to me that she had never been around kids before. She played with them, cuddled with them, and even joined our bedtime routine each night.

Nana, come back any time (although, I know I'm going to have to fight with Auntie Dawn over who gets you!).

The night before Nana's departure, we went out to a Chinese buffet and all of us pretty much embarrassed ourselves with the amount of food we consumed. My kids might have single-handedly caused the restaurant to rethink their 40 cents per year of age price for children at the buffet.

And is it not perfectly appropriate that Corene and Ava got these two fortunes in their fortune cookies (you figure out whose was whose):

To close, I will lavish upon you a tidbit of Chinese tradition trivia that I bet you didn't know.

One of the first nights Nana was with us, we had LeeAnn Chin for dinner (I was mortified that Nana might take one bite and declare the food completely inauthentic... to our surprise, she really liked it!).

At the end of the meal, we handed her a fortune cookie, and she said, "What's this?"

We said, "What?! It's a fortune cookie, you know, the Chinese tradition?"

"I've never heard of this. I've never seen anything like it. What's on the paper?"

"A fortune... You mean this ISN'T a Chinese tradition?"

Sure enough, it's not a Chinese tradition. They were first created in the United States about 100 years ago. Wiki asserts that"Throughout the western world, it is usually served with Chinese food in Chinese restaurants as a dessert. The cookies are little-known in mainland China or Taiwan."

Who knew.