Zachary's Birthday

Zachary turned 28 this year. He turned 28 in September, on the 28th to be exact. Yes, I am just now blogging about it. I'm super on top of things. Soooo anyways. Zachary had a great birthday! It started with this monstrosity of a German chocolate cake above. I set out on the mission to make the best German chocolate cake for him ever. While, I did make a cake that was pretty delicious, it was not the best German chocolate cake ever. But It was a different dessert entirely but still good.

Zachary had brought the cake to work on the Friday before his birthday to share with his coworkers.

One of my students, Sherry, who Zachary also teaches at our house, made Zachary this adorable pencil holder with a toilet paper roll & tea taped to it. Haha. Cute.

For Zachary's birthday his parents gave him money & he decided to get a kindle with it. This was a great choice and the best birthday present for him. He uses it everyday now!

I was at a loss as to what to get him so I decided to get him a madge padge of things; cologne, a Cuban cigar, chocolate that i picked out from a fancy chocolate case (fun!), 3rd wave coffee and a new tea to try.

Little Justin brought Zachary some chocolates.

Zachary's first birthday here in Qingdao he got so much chocolate! Everyone here really knows his soft spot for chocolate, even his students.

The night before Zachary's birthday we headed over to Justin & Catherine's house for the boys to exchange presents. Justin's birthday is the day before Zachary's & the boys have celebrated each others birthdays, 3 together and 1 apart, the last 4 years.  Justin, Catherine & Elijah gave Zachary a sweet card, a gift card for a massage, wine & some coffee. 

For Justin's birthday Zachary gave Justin a guitar. Justin had mentioned that he wanted a guitar a few times the past few years & Zachary had been listening & holding that wish in the back of his mind. This year, when I asked Zachary what he wanted to get Justin for his birthday, he immediately said he a guitar! It was a total surprise to Justin. Zachary carried the guitar over in his own guitar case and told Justin that he had a song to play for him. He started playing, looked at the guitar and said, "Wait?! What?! This isn't my guitar!" Haha. And then handed it to Justin.

Elijah also liked the guitar & I must say, looked really cute with it!

The beautiful Esser's on Justin's Birthday.

For dinner on Zachary's birthday, we went to Trattoria Verde, our much loved Qingdao Italian restaurant.

Zachary parking our little bike.

We love the close, coziness of this place.

Also the menu is in Italian, it's legit.

During dinner we read Eclipse. :) We've already Twilight together and are slowly making our way through Eclipse.

Glittery nails for the occasion. :)

Also, raviolis.

And sausage and broccoli pizza.

After dinner we headed to a local coffee shop for more Eclipse reading & celebrating Zachary's birth.

Zachary had a great birthday & we had lots of fun celebrating him. :)

Christmas Eve Show

 

On Christmas Eve The Followers had another show at the same Italian restaurant as their second performance, La Contina. This time they performed in style, coordinating their outfits. :) They looked amazing. I especially loved Zachary's suspenders and bow tie, but I might be biased. ;) Musically,  they did a fantastic job again. This night things were especially sounding good as they've added a new band member, Brendon, on the bass. But of course we were still missing Valerio on the ka hone drum. (We miss you Valerio!) I said it the last post but I'll say it again, they just keep getting better and better. It's a joy to watch and listen.

Okay, enough with the pictures, right?! I keep having people ask me to post them actually singing. So, here we go. A short clip of The Follower's Christmas Eve show. It's not the best quality of video but you can have a small sample. :) Enjoy!

Cookie Christmas Party with the Kiddos

The week before Christmas we hosted a Christmas Party for some of our after school kids. We wanted them to experience a real Christmas party, full of yummy desserts, Christmas cheer and love. We also really wanted a special time to share with them about the true meaning of Christmas. In preperation for the party I went on a baking frenzy, which was so much fun, and filled all the Pinterest, Chrsitmas baking needs in my little heart. I have never done this before, the all out baking, one thing after another, thing. I loved it. I made tootsie roll cookies, Mexican wedding cookies, cranberry oatmeal cookies, chocolate fudge oatmeal truffle balls, Andes mint chocolate cookies, egg nog cookies (which were A-MAZING, my new favorite cookie) and decorated sugar cookies.

Sherry came early and helped me decorate the sugar cookies.

The incredibly eggnog cookies! They were the only cookies I used a mix for (besides the sugar cookies ) and turned out to be my favorite. I ate them straight out of the oven so that might have added to their deliciousness. I used this mix that I picked up while in the States.

Ronald and Sherry, who are brother and sister, were so very excited to show us the durian (the stinky feet fruit) cake they made. These two are absolutely precious & just about the sweetest kids you'll ever meet.

Once all the kids got to our house, we kicked the party off with decorating our Christmas tree. The kids loved this. I don't think they've ever really decorated a Christmas tree with their families, so they had tons of fun working together to make our Christmas tree beautiful. And man, did they make it beautiful! Ha. Catherine so lovingly put the look as if "someone threw up (as in vomitted) decorations" all over the tree! Hahahaha. It was cute and very obvious that kids had decorated our trees. I thought to change it when they left but it was just too cute, so I left all their decorations up. 

 

Can we just take a second to admire how many ornaments are on the top of this tiny tree? It was a theme in their decorating, put as many ornaments together as possible and when in doubt always hang them two by two. 

Mr. Zachary was a like a little elf handing out all the ornaments one by one.

After Christmas tree decorating, we headed to our kitchen table to decorate these little gingerbread men ornaments I picked up in the States. The States, man. Geesh, there's everything there. And at Target. I bought 2 packs of with 20 gingerbread men in them each. It came with sequence, "buttons", googly eyes, bow ties, and strings, all for $5. It was the best buy ever.

Also, can I just say that we taught them the English name of the 'googly eyes' and it was precious and hilarious hearing them say 'googly eyes' over and over. I loved it. It was music to my heart, really.

All the momma's while their kiddos worked on their gingerbread men.

Annddd back to the gingerbread men decorating. This activity took ages but they thoroughly enjoyed it the whole time.

After finally finishing the decorating of their gingerbread men, we played a round of Oral English charades. Basically the opposite of charades, in that, instead of using their body to act it out, they had to use only their English words, no motions, to explain the word on their card. They had tons of fun! We then played 'pin the mustache on Santa' which I thought was going to be way more hilarious then it was because they were just too darn good! I wanted mustaches like all over our walls but they were too good for that.

After we played games & ate tons of cookies, the kids sat down and we showed them a short video cartoon about the true meaning of Christmas, the birth of Jesus.

After the video we played a slide show of our time with them over the past 2 years. They loved it! They were cracking up remembering old memories & the things we had done together. Geesh. I love these kids so much, it's going to be hard to leave them next month. 

 

*Also, I hate that all these pictures are so blurry! But I really want to remember these moments, so blurry pictures it is.