Chuseok Party

We had a really fun time with all of our friends from Lifelink last night. Clausen's were very generous with their hospitality and had around thirty people (including a lot of toddlers) at their home. Also in attendance were our Korean friends, the Yi family and Sung Hui, a foreign exchange student from South Korea attending Rockford Lutheran. Chuseok is Korean Thanksgiving and is one of the biggest holidays on their calendar. The traditions are similar to our Thanksgiving with food to celebrate the harvest and gathering with family for a large meal. For our party, everyone brought a Korean dish to pass. We white moms had been feeling the pressure for days trying to cook authentic Korean food for other Koreans. We breathed a sigh of relief when our Korean friends told us the food was good. Maybe they were just being nice :) However, the other moms are much more practiced at Korean cooking and I definitely need to step it up!

On these most special days, children wear their hanboks, traditional Korean clothing, to present themselves to their elders. Our boys are given their beautiful hanboks as gifts from their foster mothers so we treasure them and rarely put them on the kids. One thing we all wanted to do was get a group picture of all the kids in their hanboks. Even though it was like hearding chickens, it was really special to see our dark haired cuties lined up as a group in their hanboks. Sung Hui, Renatta Toldo, and Emily Yi also wore hanboks. I turned to see the reaction from Young Yi and caught at really cool moment fo her helping the girls tie their bows and straighten their jackets. It was a glimpse into her childhood and how the women must all help each other get their hanboks just perfect before going in front of their elders. Young also was able to reassure all of us white moms that we had the boys dressed correctly.

The majority of the night Steve spent chasing Dane around the house and keeping him from stealing random sippy cups. He doesn't really eat very much if he is away from home so all he had were a couple of shrimp crackers.

We didn't get a very good group shot so thank you to Melissa for letting me steal pics off of her blog!