I realize that Chinese New Year happened a few months back, but it’s still alive and well here in our house.

Let me explain.

Back in December, Flynn somehow stumbled upon a video of a Chinese New Year parade in his YouTube perusing. (Yes, our toddler peruses YouTube. Don’t judge.) Seeing as how the parade featured a giant colorful dragon, it should come as no surprise that this immediately became the coolest thing our two year old boy’s little eyes had ever seen.

And then he (and we) realized that YouTube is filled with these Chinese New Year videos. He could click from one to another and watch mesmerized for pretty much forever — or at least until his parents started to feel a little negligent and made him go read a book instead.

Fast forward a few months to February, and, what do you know, the actual Chinese New Year was upon us. We live in a pretty culturally diverse neighborhood and so there happened to be a Chinese New Year festival at the middle school a few minutes away. Of course we went. We only stayed for about 10 minutes or so, but our little guy is still raving about the event now, two months later.

And of course he’s still watching his dragon dance YouTube videos too. He’s watching one at this very moment, in fact. It’s odd, yes, but we can’t really complain. They’re a huge improvement over his previous favorite videos of people unwrapping Kinder Egg Surprises. Yes, you read that right.

(Brief aside: These egg surprise videos have millions of views. Don’t believe me? See for yourself: this one has 55 million views! It’s just someone unwrapping a candy egg with a toy inside. That’s it. And 55 million views! And there are hundreds if not thousands of videos like it! If you understand this phenomena, please enlighten me.)

Just as a reminder, we’ve never been posted to China. He doesn’t have any friends who have been posted to China. He doesn’t know any TV shows set in China. The fascination with Chinese New Year came out of the blue, but we like to think it’s a sign of a sort of curiosity that will serve him well in the crazy international lifestyle that awaits him.

Maybe that’s a stretch.

At least it’s keeping us from having to watch any egg surprise videos for a while.