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Sunday 14 February 2021

CNY in the Year of the Cow

[Pre-CNY]

We were blessed to still be able to celebrate CNY, albeit with less visitors than usual. This year's reunion dinner was a simple tze char in the comfort of mum's house. 



It was the Littlest's birthday 2 days ago, so the family celebrated with her as well. My girl loves celebrating birthdays hence she was thrilled to be able to celebrate so many times 😊


The Lee family also had a reunion dinner, and the kids wore matching batik outfits. The boy can barely squeeze into his but he did it anyway to match with his beloved Mei Mei, one last time. 


Even though we will only be receiving 8 visitors to our home this year, I spent time decorating the house as I have always done every year. I even changed the wall sticker of our entryway 😊


Since we won't be doing a lot of visiting and had a lot of spare red packets, I decided to upcycle them into additional decorations. I thought of doing something simple, a paper fan made out of red packets. I love how beautiful the fan turned out! It looked great with my existing decor 😁



However, I still had a lot of red packets left! So I started Googling for DIY red packet lantern tutorials and found one that works with the number of red packets we had and was easy enough

Thankfully my girl excitedly volunteered to help me with it, otherwise I would have taken the whole night to do it! 


We were pretty proud of the end result! 



With other homemade decorations, some flowers and lucky bamboo, our home was ready for the lunar new year 😊


[DAY 1]

I usually try to dress the kids in traditional Chinese outfits for CNY. The eldest wanted to twin with her sister but it's not easy to find matching outfits given the large 9 year age gap. I searched various websites and finally found a shop on Lazada selling Cheong Sams in sizes ranging from 80cm to 160cm. The eldest is very picky and rejected most of my suggestions. She ended up picking this pretty print for the sisters. I also bought very Chinese style earrings for the girl and I to match our Cheong Sams. 



Decided to twin with the boy this time since I'm usually twinning with the girls. Our outfits were from the final collection by Charmed on 6th Avenue, which will be closing really soon (quite sad about it as I really like the fit of their clothes). 


I love that each outfit came with matching masks! So cute right! 


After the kids wished their grandmother happy new year, we made our first visit to my maternal grandmother's home. Unlike other years where we got to catch up with my maternal cousins, this year was just us due to the 8 visitors per day restriction (each family had to book which day they wanted to visit). I hardly have time to visit my grandmother so I find it a blessing to be able to visit her every year. 

We later hung out at my mum's home and since we didn't have any homes to visit, we could fellowship for a bit longer. 


In the evening, we returned home for the Lee version. Four of the kids' cousins had just returned from the US so it was a chance for the 8 Lee cousins to hang out together. 
 

As usual, the Masterchef Mum-in-law cooked up a feast! We were so full! 


Even though we had to limit our usual CNY festivities, it was still a blessing to be able to meet with family. 


[DAY 2]

We did not have anywhere to visit on Day 2 and decided to visit Gardens by the Bay to see the Dahlia Dreams CNY display.



We wore our matching orange Minion t-shirts that we got from Universal Studios Singapore last year. 







There were a lot of people but we still managed to get nice photos of the decoration and flowers. 

This year's River Hongbao is also held at Gardens by the Bay, but we didn't have time to visit. 


CNY is really all about family (and dressing up 🤭)! As long as you have family, everything is good 😊

My attempt at a decorated Yu Sheng 😄

Happy CNY 2021! May it be a Covid-free year for all of us!