Julianna's party #2

This is the first year that Julianna has asked to do a separate party for her local friends.  It was a HUGE success!  So very thankful!

I walked up to school to meet everyone at the end of the day Friday ...  Julianna invited five friends from her class and then Lydia invited a friend too, and of course the boys.  Made for a nice crowd waiting at the gate (Lydia and her friend were out earlier than Julianna's class).

Several of these girls have been in our home before, and all of them live within walking distance (this is the benefit of dense housing - the neighborhood school is LITERALLY in the neighborhood).

We started with the pass-the-present game and everyone really enjoyed it!

Then, Matt arrived home from work and I dived into pizza making (with all kinds of help! - mostly inexperienced!)

This was wild, and hilarious, and noisy, and fun, and messy, and definitely a big win!

Later that night, right before I turned out the lights she told me, "It's kind of like I have double the friends, because I have them in two languages."  She doesn't have a lot of American friends that can speak Chinese and run with the local crowd, and of course none of her local friends know another American at all (not including our family members).  So she's usually either "all in" one world, or "all in" the other.  It's a unique world, and she handles it so very well.

back row (Lydia, Yang SiRan, Wu LingJun)
front row (Yang Miao, Julianna, Yi YunDuo, Yang Shuting, Chen YiLan)

Whew!  What a night!

So thankful for this girl of mine and her many parties - she's got one more coming up - on the date of her birthday.  The final party is for our American friends in the neighborhood, and it's part Christmas, part celebrating Julianna.

She's asked for lasagna dinner, which is a multi day process to make - ha!  I ordered imported noodles and shredded mozzarella, and I made my ground sausage a few weeks ago (its in the freezer).  Tomorrow I need to keep stock piling yogurt (in the winter my yogurt making is sloooooooow because the temps are lower and it takes that much longer for the milk to thicken).  Wednesday I'll make ricotta.  Thursday I'll chop tomatoes and brown the sausage and ground beef and make the sauce layer.  Friday I'll put it all together.  And then we'll party :)