Frilly tea party girls!

Hello again. My tea party-picnic habit is catching on around here!

Yesterday my girls and I did another family picnic at the park for breakfast. This time our picnic was at 8:45am - ish, well before our scheduled 10 am play date there with dear friends. While I was packing up the picnic at home Elena, age 2, suggested that we pack enough hot cross buns for our friends to have, too. I was so proud!!!

Again, it was lovely to sit in the quiet morning and have an al fresco breakfast with my little ones, with all our vintage linen and my china cup. As I poured my tea I thought of my own dear grandma, who is now in Heaven, who always packed a thermos of hot water and a tea bag to bring with her when she was going out.

After our breakfast was over and we were playing on the playground with sand toys, bubbles, a ball and the swing set, it was wonderful to watch our friends as they picnicked with the snack we'd packed them. The mother and 3 daughters made a lovely tableau - daintily eating hot cross buns while sitting on our red and white checkered picnic cloth, in the shade of an olive tree.

Then this morning, little Elena invited me to have a tea party with her on the living room floor! She had spread a baby blanket on the rug and had her china doll-sized tea set out. "Mama, come have a a tea party with me." she beckoned. "What kind of tea is it?" I humored her, wondering what sort of answer my 2 year old would come up with.

"English breakfast!" she announced cheerily, holding up her tea pot.

Well, you could have knocked me down with a feather.

You can bet that I attended that tea party right away, after giving her a big hug and telling her how much I love her. Oh, I almost cried I was so happy.

Tea time with our little girls

Took the sweet little girls on a picnic in the park for breakfast today! It worked beautifully, I'm so pleased. I used a real basket, along with some of my great-grandmother's crocheted table linens, a quilt I made and a red and white checkered cloth that is sooooo classically picnic-y. It was so delightful. Brought along scones, a jar of jam, fruit and yogurt, a thermos of hot tea, and a real teacup and saucer, each swathed in tea towels for safety. It all worked so well, and as it was just me and my daughters, nothing felt show-offy or awkward.

Lately I have been feeling lonely for fellow tea drinkers, nostalgic for tea times shared with good friends who understand (that is, as Anne Shirley would say, kindred spirits). Kindred spirits who do not think it pretentious or irritating to use cloth and china even on a picnic.

--in case you are new to my own story, I am new-ish to my current region and am thousands of miles away from my New England tea drinker family and friends!--

Somewhere along the line I began to feel sad about not being near those friends, and then I decided that I should just go ahead and have tea parties with my own little girls. Even if they do only drink from sippy cups, and even if we are in the hot desert where everyone seems devoted only to cold drinks.

Today I found great freedom in simply packing up our wee picnic breakfast just exactly the way I wanted to, and eating it with the girls in the park. If we had been meeting anyone on a play date I would have felt like a show-off with such a basket. But since it was simply a family affair, I didn't have to consider the perceptions or reactions of others, and I was free to do things in exactly my own way, which was an incredible relief. God makes everyone differently, of course, and I think He made me to do things with frills. For me, it isn't showing off, its just the way I am.

Madeline and Elena were blissfully unaware of any of my over-processing, and they greatly enjoyed the novelty of eating breakfast at the park.

There was a Highland Festival at the park this morning, so during our breakfast we were serenaded by distant bagpipes, and lots of kilted musicians and Scottish enthusiasts strode past us. It was marvelous.

My Retro-Themed Kitchen: the tea portion of the garland.

Happy little people drinking tea! This is right over the section of my counter devoted to tea-making. I often stand at this spot while pulling together everything that goes into making and serving a nice spot of tea. And this sign below always cracks me up!
And now let's all sit down for a good cup of the wonderful brew. Shall I pour?

Plum Puffs at Teatime

This is another entry for Anne of Green Gables Fashion Week founded by Bramblewood Fashion.
I had a new friend over for tea yesterday afternoon, which was the perfect excuse to try out the Plum Puffs recipe from the Anne of Green Gables Treasury. Here is the recipe:

1/2 cup water
3 T butter
1/2 cup flour
1 t white sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup plum jam
1/2 cup cream cheese (optional)
confectioner's sugar for dusting (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 425 F. Grease baking sheet.
2. In large saucepan, heat water and butter until boiling. When butter has melted, turn heat to low, and add flour and sugar all at once and mix them in thoroughly with wooden spoon. Beat mixture over low heat until it leaves the sides of the pan -- about 1 minute or less.
3. Remove pan from heat. Add one egg, beat until smooth. Add next egg, beat until smooth.
4. Drop dough by teaspoonfuls onto baking sheet, about 2 inches apart. They should be one inch around and will double in size as they bake.
5. Bake 15-2 minutes until golden brown. Remove from oven, turn heat off. Close oven door. With a toothpick, poke a tiny hole in each to allow steam out. Return the puffs to off-but-warm oven for 5 minutes. Remove and cool on rack. When cool, gently split puffs in 1/2 and fill each with a spoonful of jam and or cream cheese.
6. Arrange on a serving tray and sprinkle with confectioner's sugar if you like.
This recipe makes 2-3 dozen puffs.

I thought this recipe was much simpler in practice than it first appears! And it is not an overly sweet teatime treat at all, so at a future tea if I need a recipe to offset a bunch of sweeter confections, this would round things out quite elegantly. Anne and Diana would approve!

Honored Guests at Tea

Yesterday our household was honored to recieve two visitors from afar. I suppose that makes them sound like the Magi! Not so. It makes me so happy when they are able to visit us, as they are so special to me: these two guests are my maternal grandfather's first cousin and her husband...and to both shorten and sweeten that distant-sounding explanation of relationship, we have recently decided to classify ourselves with the following titles: Great Aunt Kathleen and Great Uncle Walter, and they refer to me as their niece. These designations are far cozier than before, when we didn't really call one another anything. Interesting how names and titles succeed in making people dearer to each other.

Another part of the reason I was so excited and honored to have my Great Aunt and Great Uncle over is because we all have so much in common. We are really kindred spirits, my Aunt and I. It doesn't seem to make a whit of difference that she was born in the 1920s and I was born in 1979 -- we really may as well be sisters. We're both readers, Christians, interested in American history and our family history, we're both quietly anti-feminism, we laugh at the same things, and simply enjoy our visits and our intermittent letter correspondence.

My Great Uncle is a real hero in my opinion, as he is one of the most gentlemanly husbands I've ever met, and he is a World War II veteran. They were passing through our neck of the woods on their way back from a visit to the World War II memorial in DC. I was fairly overwhelmed, inwardly, at the significance and the great honor it is to ahve a veteran of WWII over for tea! I hold such great respect for the work that generation of Americans did. It was good to hear their report/impression of the monument, as their good opinion of it seems to matter. The monument was created to honor him and his fellow veterans, after all. My Uncle Walter and Aunt Kathleen said the monument seemed very triumphant and respectful, and everything it ought to be. This was good news! Also, they approved of its location in relation to the other monuments and buildings of the capital. (I haven't been to DC since 2000, which was before this was complete, so I was especially curious about things). Its off in a wooded area near the Lincoln memorial. And of course, we all smiled at one another and nodded approvingly, it is always good to be in the vicinity of Lincoln!

My honored guests and I enjoyed our short time together greatly: they gave gifts to my daughter, she smiled and was sweet to them in her baby way and happily let them each hold her. I think instinctively she knows how wonderful they are, even though she's only 12 months old. I shyly brought out my last several sewing projects to show Aunt Kathleen, who finds joy in looking at such things. And I showed Uncle Walter the gardening project that my husband and I have undertaken, and he was very impressed. All too soon the tea was over and my relatives had to be on their way. We waved from the driveway and sighed after their vehicle turned the corner. If only we lived closer!