Our Tea Party

We had a full-fledged English Tea Party one afternoon this past week.

Chinese Style, of course.

It all started with the children discovering several tea sets as I straightened/organized one day. I started dealing with one pile in mine and Jason's bedroom that had been there for (cough, cough)....a while. The pile contained two boxed tea sets from our last trip to China. The children remembered they'd seen a similar box tucked away in Elisabeth's closet...and after pulling up a chair and digging in there....YES, another tea set. Add in one more that was on display in our dining room.

That equals FOUR tea sets.

And we have FOUR children.

It didn't take them long to do that math.

They decided which tea set belonged to whom. And we planned a tea party for the next afternoon.

The children drew up invitations for their honored guests:

Elisabeth invited Ling...


...Noah invited Chippyye (who seriously deserves her own post sometime)...

...Daniel invited Bandit...

...and Lily Kay invited Sister Jaguar.

Thankfully, all the invitees were able to attend.

And the children took very good care of their guests.

Elisabeth had drawn up signs leading the way to the party:

Can't read that very well?

This may be a little better (but not much):

"Welcome to the Tea Party" (heart) Thank You

"Faith Hope Love (and Chinese character for "Love").....The Greatest of These is Love."

We'd made a trip to Walm&rt and bought only totally healthy (wink), Tea party food:

Cheez-its and Pepperidge Farm cookies are totally healthy...right?!?!



Well, at least the organic yogurt was healthy.

And two of my children don't actually care for tea, so they opted to have milk in their tea pitchers instead.
(This boy would be very happy to actually just live on milk.)

Here are the children proudly posing in front of the tea sets that they chose as their own:


(They each also had a ceramic place marker at their seat. I bought these from Princess House about 8 years ago and this might have been the first time they'd ever been used!)









We had so much fun using our best manners as I went around and served each of them off our beautiful serving dishes.

"Would you care for some turkey, Madam?"

"Yes, ma'am, thank you very much!"

I think we still have some work to do in the manners arena, though.



Ya think???

After reviving ourselves with a few refreshments...we had enough energy to do a craft/snack.

A craft that you then eat....brilliant!

And I have to give Mr. Noah all the credit for this. After we started planning this tea party, he ran to his room, pulled an old magazine article out of his "Speshul Stuff" drawer and said, "Can we make these???"

They were "Flip Flops" made out of Milano cookies with icing and candy on them!






The icing started out white. The children used an obscene amount of food coloring.


Ya think???

Despite a bad case of Food Coloring Overdose - from which they quickly recovered, thankfully - a great time was had by all!