A Week, Briefly (June 6, 2022)

 I've been lying on the floor in what our kid yoga calls Starfish pose, but is apparently called Shavasana by true yoga enthusiasts.  I'm not doing any real yoga . . . just lying there, feeling my body rest . . . and listening to gentle podcasts (WEH, John Bytheway, Scholé Sisters, General Conference, etc.).

If I time it right, I get 10-15 minutes of quiet before a baby wakes up from a nap and crawls onto me or a kid comes in asking a question.

We've been in a season of peace long enough that I'm actually starting to recover from the trauma of behaviors and fears we've lived in for so long.  I can feel my body and mind loosening the knots that have held me so tightly.  I'm laughing more.  (I am guiltily admitting here that those silly Facebook time suckers are part of my personal therapy.  I laughed so hard I cried at a collection of Amazon reviews the other night.)

And it's nice to be not doing formal school right now because as I'm healing, I'm also starting to get back a sense of wonder and fun.  I opened a little book of manners that I bought on a whim a few weeks ago, and matching the day's date exactly was the first of a series of preparations for a tea party.

I've been pondering a summer tea tradition for several weeks now!

Something happened to muck up our planned schedule for the week, so we dropped everything and went to the thrift shop to find tea cups and saucers!  We found enough for the 6 kids, but it took the older girls and me 5 more tries over the week to find ours. 

And what a good time we had searching!!

I'm sure at least half of our "teacups" are actually coffee cups, and a couple of them came from what looked like the leftovers from a punch set, and some of our saucers are actually dessert plates, but we're all very happy with our inexpensive collection.

Part of the serendipity of our collecting adventures came from the pretty cup and saucer with ivy on the bottom left in the picture.  Nature Angel fell in love with it, but we couldn't find a price.  We took it to the front desk, and the dealer there promised to help us out.  It turned out that it belonged to a partial set of dishes, and we had to buy the whole thing or nothing at all.  

38 pieces for $14.50 because the set had been sitting gathering dust for several months, and the dealer wanted to get rid of it.

We weren't planning to add so many dishes or spend $14.50 so that Nature Angel could get the cup and saucer she wanted, but . . . what the heck!  We did it!

And we used the plates and bowls as serving dishes for our tea party!

We spent the week preparing.

Cleaning mulberries for homegrown, homemade mulberry jam

Stirring the batter for homemade gluten-free bread

Mister Man and Ladybug made sugar cookies.

Making scones

Decorating sugar cookies

I don't know what happened to pictures of Brother, Beowulf, and Little Princess making cucumber sandwiches, but they did, and here's the result on the table . . . that we decorated with a bedsheet-turned-table-runner and a thrift store ceramic teapot filled with grocery store flowers.  

At the last minute, I added hot dogs to the menu . . . not very tea party-ish, but everything took so long with so many kid helpers that we didn't sit down to the table until 7:00 pm, and I wanted to be sure that our tea party menu was filling enough for dinner.

In the end, there was enough and to spare (the kids ate the leftovers for breakfast this morning), and everyone felt so special.

I told the kids we would not have another party this complicated for a long time, but we will try to have simple teas--perhaps a cup of tea and a piece of cake--fairly often now that we have cups and saucers to go around.

The vote in favor was unanimous.

The rest of the week passed in an easy rhythm with a math day, a library day, a park day, and an art day.

We returned 68 books, and I thought, "Hooray, we're lightening our book load at home."  But then we checked out 74 . . .

We did an art lesson before Mister Man and Brother headed over to the neighbor's house for their gardening apprenticeship session--they work in her garden for 2 hours each week.  They're helping her, and she's teaching them.

The kids' free time was all about picking mulberries and playing in the water.

Little birds saying, "Peez!  Peez!  Peez!" until Brother dropped a mulberry into a waiting mouth!

Lola is getting better and better at tree climbing!

She's at least 20 feet up!

Belle got the job at the chiropractic office!  She's busy working both at Freddie's and this job until her 2 weeks' notice at Freddie's is over.

Next week is Girls' Camp!