David in China Town

China Town
Originally uploaded by j david.

Once in a great while, Kristen managed to wrestle the camera away from David. Here, David and Kitty were taking in the view as we headed back uptown to get ready for Kristen's birthday dinner.

Kristen and Friend

Kristen and Friend
Originally uploaded by j david.

This is a mask that is used in the New Year's parades. David forced Kristen to pose for this picture.

Lanterns

Lanterns
Originally uploaded by j david.

This is the icon in the upper left hand corner. The streets were packed (this was the eve of the weeklong New Year's festival) with lanterns, dragons, coins, clothing and all kinds of New Year's goodies.

If this is Manhattan, it must be Chinese New Year...

...or at least Kristen's birthday. We traveled to New York to celebrate Kristen's birthday and could not resist visiting Chinatown on the eve of Chinese New Years. (OK, OK, so we're late in posting.) The streets were packed, not only with tourists, but with the locals intent on really whooping it up and welcoming in the year of the dog.

(If you look carefully, you can find the birthday girl herself in the photo above).

One of the more interesting things we noticed were the giant "party poppers" that were being sold on the streets. (Alex, if you're reading this they were HUGE--you'd love 'em). As kids, we both loved the "poppers" that shot confetti. They were small (about the size of a shot glass) and were designed to be used indoors. The giant ones we saw were about the size of a telescope (~3 feet long and 2-3"wide) and launched shiny confetti 50-60 feet into the air! (sounded a bit like gun fire...but looked better) Have a look at the picture on the right.

We met Kristen's mom in New York and had a great time exploring Chinatown, visiting museums, and spending time with dear family friends.

We'll post more about the museums later, but for now, we'll close with a couple of picutres of the folks we celebrated Kristen's birthday with. Thanks to Mike, Carol and all of our friends and family as you help us pass the time!

Building the family photo album for our dossier

Although a dossier is mostly comprised of official documents, it also includes a family photo album. The album includes photos of us, our immediate family, our home, our local community, and tells something about us as a couple. We were encouraged to be creative and have fun with the project, and so the process of culling pictures and learning to create a colorful scrapbook of pictures began. (Our front cover is shown at left; the space at lower left is ready for the chinese translation.)

We started with pictures from our wedding day. We included pictures from our recent trips to Montreal, Spain and London, because we hope to share our love of foreign travel with our daughter. Since education is important to us, we included Dave's graduation picture. We showed the beach front in Wilmette, where we spend our summers with family and friends, the local school and library. And we included lots of pictures of our parents, our brothers and sisters and their kids. (Thanks to Kitty and Anders, who sent us good pictures of Kristen's family, and thanks to Maria for sending us good pictures of Dave's family.)

Here are a few highlights from our photo album. Enjoy!




Here's David (above) and Kristen (below) this past summer in the Chinese Garden, Montreal Botanic Gardens, Canada.





Here's Kristen and our parents, Kitty, Maxine and Jack (right), enjoying burgers and beer at Cranberry's in Indian Lake, summer 2004.



Kristen's family (below) gathered in June 2005 to celebrate a significant birthday for Kitty. Here's the whole clan: Charlotte, Bjorn, Anders, Kitty (front row), Jan, Erik and Kristen (standing).