Yesterday’s tea party for Pink Dancer went very well (except for the 95 degrees part). I will post pictures of the tea table very soon. Each of the six children were served a dessert plate filled with:

• two tea sandwiches, one cut like a heart and one cut like a teapot with cookie cutters.
• one celery stick with peanut butter and raisins
• one small ramekin filled with ranch dressing with six petite carrots sticking up like orange birthday candles.

Now, there’s much more, but before I continue, I will confess almost all of the above was NOT eaten. So much for adding the healthy choices.

To continue…

• one Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano cookie (remember, I don’t bake and these were by request from the Birthday Girl
• one Le Petit Ecolier*, another store bought cookie
• one chocolate-dipped strawberry and one white-chocolate dipped strawberry each in little “Happy Birthday” paper candy cups (these I did make myself, I am proud to say.)
• two small bunches of grapes, one green and one red

I love making up plates and thinking of the mix of colors and variety of food. I served them on my grandmother’s every day dishes I inherited from her without fear.
We served hot (Anne Shirley’s Almond Black, naturally decaffeinated) and cold cherry iced tea. Most of the children, despite the weather, chose the hot tea because of the darling sugars they could add with milk. And at the end we brought out the cake.

The table looked lovely and a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s on its way. I was particularly thrilled with the beautiful centerpiece I made from $15 dollars of pink flowers from the grocery store (alstromeria, baby roses, and carnations). The children sat enraptured (and to my disturbance unfamiliar with the story) as I read “Rapunzel”, a version with classic, Renaissance-type paintings for illustrations. Rapunzel was the choice theme for my daughter. We played an opposite-type fishing game with a lllloooonnnngggg braid made from raffia that the children threw out of the tree-house window. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!” the nine-year old would cry. The six-year olds threw it down and the nine-year old would attach a dollar-store prize. The children loved it.

Meanwhile, the mothers sat under the shade trees eating the same foods I had given the children laid out buffet-style and LOTS of iced tea. The heat and mess almost did me in, but the reward of shining faces in children’s wonder makes it all worthwhile.