The Nevin-Graham Family: Turning Four in China

We've been unsure how to celebrate Alex's fourth birthday here in China as we haven't attended any birthday parties here so aren't really sure what the "done thing" is. However, we have seen photos on the school website of a classmate/tong xue (不客气 tong shu-er) of hers having a cake at school. So - easy, we thought, we'll just send a cake to school for snack on her birthday. She did say that she wanted a similar cake to last year - princesses - plus Dorothy the dinosaur from the Wiggles. Not having seen such cakes in the bakeries here, we decided on a Hello Kitty one instead.

A few days before her birthday, Mummy takes her rudimentary chinese to a bakery, looks through a brochure and orders a cake. All is fine and the order form is muddled through with Mummy only needing some translation from a colleague of Daddy's, Linlin (over the phone), for the final question: When will you collect it morning or afternoon? Knowing that we would be going to the class too, Mummy opted for afternoon at post-nap snack time.

Fast forward to the day of Alex's birthday and all is well with the world - aside from Mummy being ill overnight along with Sebastien. Daddy volunteers to get the cake and gets the relevant information from Mummy (including the copy of the order form). Hmm, apparently the cake is large enough to warrant its own stabilising styrofoam platform to deliver it...

We meet Daddy at the you er yuan 幼儿园(you - are - you - en)/kindergarten along with one of Daddy's students to help smooth translation issues. Hmm, he gets out of the taxi with a cake box as big as him...

Okay - so Mummy has learnt a new hanzi/vocab word: ying chun 英寸(ing-chun). Note that this doesn't mean "serves", "persons", "pieces", or "centimetres". Nope, this word means INCHES folks.

The cake with its special foam platform.

We arrived just as the children were getting up from their nap so we waited in the playground until they were being served their snack.

Here's Alex eating hers.

We had thought that the birthday cake would be the snack so not sure what happened there...

The class then gathered around and sang Happy Birthday to Alex - in chinese (see video at bottom of post).

zhu ni sheng ri kuai le/wish you a happy birthday
zhu ni sheng ri kuai le/wish you a happy birthday
zhu ni sheng ri kuai le/wish you a happy birthday
zhu ni yongyuan kuai le/wish you happiness forever.

Then Alex helped her teachers serve the cake to her classmates.

She was pretty happy with her cake.

The class was prompted to say xie xie gao ya li (thank you Alex) to which Daddy replied "Bu keqi (boo-cur-chee 不客气 )" to the teachers' amusement and delight.

The cake was huge - the class of just over 30, including teachers, only made it through a third of it so we "donated" the rest of it to WISE students.

Alex did enjoy having her Mummy and Daddy at school to show how well she's doing. This is really our first time seeing her in the classroom so it was fun for us too. Sebastien was very excited to see the shopping trolley/cart in the play area of the classroom and threw a tantrum when it came time to leave.

Alex had a ball but she was staying at school until home-time when she'd catch the bus home - so we waved goodbye and left her to it. Here she is giving us a cheesy grin through the window to say goodbye.

Mummy couldn't resist a sneak peak at the outdoor toy boxes that had appeared since we'd arrived - presumably for the children to play with in the afternoon. Very interesting, and Alex assures Mummy, very exciting. These are a few of the more interesting ones - there were the expected balls, hoops and beanbags too.