Naptime

Tea

Last night's tea was a wonderful success. Thank you for you suggestions! Thank you Jodi for your kind words and prayers. I spent too much time standing yesterday and didn't sleep enough, so I'm paying the price today! Hopefully, I'll be able to post more tomorrow after a good night's sleep. We had a great time! I am so glad we did it.

Tea on Tuesday

This Tuesday evening I will host a tea party for a friend's birthday. I think we'll have about 10 of us. She is expecting only one other friend and myself, so we'll have a bit of a surprise for her.

Because all of us belong to the same MOPS group we decided to have the tea in the evening so that sitters/Dads are available. She may or may not bring her newborn which is fine, but I didn't think we could handle the 20+ kids that these Moms have as well.

So, I am trying to plan a menu that works for evening. I think that I'll pretty much just do what I'd normally do for an Afternoon Tea, just serve it at 7:00 p.m. Hope the Tea Etiquette Police don't get me. :)

I may throw in an extra savory dish, like a quiche, to make it more substantial. I don't know. What do you think? What would you expect at that time? Also, since it's a Birthday, should I make a cake, or would a Trifle be enough? (I recently found the cutest hand-painted trifle bowl!)

Menu
Assorted Tea Sandwiches
Quiche (?)
Scones with Jam, Curds, and Cream
Tea Breads
Fruit Tartlets
Ginger Cookies
Chocolate Pecan Toffee
Trifle (and/or) Cake
Tea and Punch

I've started baking the things that can be frozen like the bread for sandwiches, pumpkin bread and the cookies already. I figure if I do a few things each day I'll be ready for Tuesday evening without collapsing. Help me out with any suggestions or ideas you have, please!

Picture found at AllPosters.com

Homemaking

From the Preface of
Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House
by Cheryl Mendelson~

When you keep house, you use your head, your heart, and your hands together to create a home-the place where you live the most important parts of your private life.

Housekeeping is an art: it combines intuition and physical skill to create comfort, health, beauty, order, and safety.

It is also a science, a body of knowledge that helps is seek those goals and values wisely, efficiently, humanely. Such knowledge is drawn from practical experience, family traditions, the natural and social sciences, and many other stores of understanding and information.

Painting by Sandy Lynam Clough. Visit her wonderful website at www.sandysteasociety.com and sign up today for the forum.

It's Been a Long Week

Sweetheart, Pumpkin & Flat Stanley from Joshua @ the SW Market

We've gotten Pumpkin's new room completely cleaned out and most of his stuff moved in. Reality clashed with Mommy's vision pretty hard. I was setting everything up to be colorful, creative, and catalog perfect. Following right behind me was Pumpkin, pulling down and throwing everything he could touch. Sigh.
Revised plan: bare and safe. It's pretty boring, but he can play so he's happy. Sweetheart told me to focus instead on making the nursery pretty again. Good advice.
I had a friend offer a crib to borrow, so we'll put that in the new room as soon as I can pick it up. So for now he's still in the nursery, as that crib won't roll through the doorway and we see no reason to dismantle and set up cribs twice when we can just do it once.
I'll take some pictures once I get the crib up and a few things on the walls. Right now it's a great playroom. So, now it's time to finish sorting through the stuff that hasn't found a new home yet and is still piled in the loft driving me nuts. At least I can get to the computer and sit down today, which is more than the last few day!
Also, Sweetheart put Pumpkin to bed Wednesday night without the pacifier while I was gone. Cool. He's slept every night since then without it. He got it for one nap since then, but only because I was so desperate for some sleep. It's not been easy for him, or me. He's struggling to go to sleep at naptime and bedtime. Plus, now he's up and fussing at six in the morning instead of just playing quietly in his crib like he used to do. Bummer.
It's either do it now, or later and I certainly don't want to be doing this after the baby arrives and I'm already totally sleep deprived. Into every life a little rain, and tears, must fall...

Tea Book Review

Years ago Victoria Magazine published The Charms of Tea with the top cover picture. It was republished recently with a new cover and some different photographs, but the same lovely content. You may see excerpts from the book here. The Charms of Tea is a delightful books full of the wonderful photographs that drew readers to Victoria Magazine. It is also filled with quotations and excerpts from literature related to tea, as well as containing a section of recipes and menu ideas. It is filled with quotes from Wordsworth to Oscar Wilde to Lucy Maud Montgomery. The Charms of Tea gives a lovely history of varies types of tea through history including The Victorian Tea and The Social Tea, as well as a Tea Glossary and various Tea Sources.

It's an enjoyable read as well as a fine tea cookbook. Its recipe section is divided into recipes for Teas, Savories, Breads, Spreads, Cookies, and Cakes. It contains quite a few recipes for drinks to serve at a tea besides simply hot tea.

One of my favorites is the Lavender and Lime recipe. It's so simple, but refreshing. One simply steeps a few teaspoons of lavender flowers in a cup of boiling water for ten minutes, strains out the flowers, and pours the resulting tea in a pitcher of limeade. I love to serve this at warm weather teas as a refreshing change from iced tea.

This is definitely a book to seek out. From start to finish it full of the wonderful treats one would expect for Victoria. Perfect for novice tea lovers with its directions on Brewing the Perfect Pot of Tea, to the veteran tea takers with new and delicious ideas, there is something for everyone in this delightful book.

Life

Pumpkin Enjoys His Scone at the Outdoor Market

I've been finding it hard to post much lately. I've got a pile of things to blog on sitting next to me, but I haven't seemed to do much. I had a couple of posts to write that went with some pictures I took, but I accidentally deleted the pictures when I downloaded them. Oops.

I've also been so tired and do the bare minimum around the house that I'm not getting any writing done. I'm at 29 weeks and starting my midwife appointments every two weeks now. It's hard to believe I'm on the downhill stretch! I never seemed to get my energy back like I did in the first pregnancy. Doubt it will happen now! Life is going very well right now for us. We are happy and healthy and enjoying our growing family.

All spare time right now is being spent converting our guest room/craft room into Pumpkin's new room and preparing the nursery for the new little one. It's a lot of work. It's hard to not just be able to bust through it all in a few days. Thank goodness Sweetheart is strong!

Right now we've moved the Hoosier cabinet from the room to the loft, rearranged the entire loft, moved the bed to the basement for storage, and I'm stuck in the mire of what to do with all the stuff that has lived in that room for four years. Several bags are in the trash, some en route to the Salvation Army, and piles are sitting everywhere in the loft and the room.

Books seem to be a major problem: we have too many! I've gone through the book self in our bedroom and moved out a bunch of books. I've replaced them with the books I love and reread the most. Now, I'm sorting through Sweetheart's books and my books and Pumpkin's books to see what to keep and where to keep them.

Sorting out the craft supplies has been easier than the books. I've reloaded the Hoosier with my favorite things and am filling up a tub of things I want to keep, but can store in the basement for now.

Plus, there's the fun part of trying to decide how to arrange Pumpkin's new room. I saw some darling sheet sets from Pottery Barn Kids. I love their Little Builder pattern, but it's too expensive for us. Sweetheart asked why we needed a theme. I told him: Grandmas! I think we'll just go with a lot of primary colors and some retro style toys and things that we already have tucked here and there.

I should have taken "before" and "after" pictures, but I'd of probably deleted them anyways... Now, I'm too embarrassed to post "during" pictures as it is all quite a disaster. Maybe I'll get it together by the end of the week and post some pictures then. Maybe.

Questions for you all: How did you transition kids from cribs to beds? Pumpkin's just 18 months and I'm not sure he understands to just stay on the mattress on the floor. He strikes me as the type who will be up at 5:00 a.m. playing with his toys.

When should we ditch the pacifier? What's worked for you? I'm leaning towards trying to get him settled in bed first.

Why is it Pumpkin loves to stick his entire face in the water in the bathtub, but screams bloody murder when I try to rinse his hair after shampooing it? Yes, it is a no-tears type, but he apparently can't read the label yet. Suggestions?

Last item: Pumpkin has allergies. How in the world to I teach him to blow his nose? He'll tell me when he has boogers (nice), but I can't seem to be able to get him to blow not sniff.

Sweet moment with Pumpkin reading the book God Loves Me:
Mommy: Who's this?
Pumpkin with Big Smile: Jesus.

Sweet One

Reflections on Tiannamen Square

I remember my first visit to Tiannamen Square. It was for the national holiday in November marking when the Communists gained control of China. It was my first trip up to Beijing.
I was nervous and did not know what to expect. I was surprised at how the Chinese responded to Tiannamen. They wanted to take us there so we could see it. No one mentioned June 4th. Foremost in my mind, of course, was the Tiannamen Square massacre. I figured they'd want to keep us from there, but everyone just acted like it never happened. I wondered if there would be evidence of the violence that occurred, but we just all loaded up onto the school's bus and drove north.
We spent the day walking around the area, visiting the Forbidden City (where the Emperors lived) that is directly across from the Square and spent time in the Square itself. Basically, it's about a mile square piece of concrete with some memorial statues to great Communists (none of the students who died, of course) and Mao's mausoleum (The Maosoleum) as well as thousands of pots of flowers arranged in neat designs. Across the street on one side is the Great Hall of the People, where government officials work. It's like our Capitol building, but uglier. There were unarmed soldiers around who ended up trying to play with the Nerf football one of the American teachers brought, but appeared to do little as far as the crowds.
The place was packed with people. There were thousands of people in the Square, mostly families, many of whom were busy flying kites. Our group of eight Americans stood out from the crowd and we ended up in group photos with all sorts of people we'd never met before.
It wasn't at all what I expected. I think I thought there would be blood stains on the cement. The only sign that anything had ever occurred were some bullet holes that you could see in a few of the statues. It was basically like a giant concrete park in the middle of the city.
It seemed so surreal to me. It still does. During that year in China I had the opportunity to visit the Square several more times. I even bought a kite and flew my red fish kite in the Square. I have a photograph somewhere of my kite flying over the portrait of Mao. I ended up photographed a lot that day.
When I returned home I had the opportunity to read more and study about what had occurred in those fateful days in the Square in 1989. I cried often as I read. How senseless the deaths all seemed. For centuries, the Square had been the place for the Chinese to protest and air their grievances before the Emperor and the government. The people were in the right place, but one of the big problems was that it was definitely the wrong time.
The students had gathered in the Square to mourn the death of a Chinese official beginning in April. Intellectuals, students and labor activists began to gather together to protest corruption in the government and to try to improve life in China. As the numbers grew and time went on the government struggled with what to do with the protesters. Protests were also occurring around the country.
Things really became more troublesome as the students launched a hinger strike just before the well-known arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev for an official government visit. It didn't look too good to have hundreds of thousands of people protesting right in front of the home of the government. (I've often wondered what would have been different if the students had chosen a different location.) Plus, there were a lot of foreign press agents who began to let the rest of the world know what was happening, so the government couldn't hide and save face. It felt compelled to do something.
In the end, no one may know all that went on. Official reports put the number of dead at 200-300, but other reports go from 2,o0o-3,000. Many died outside the Square itself as they tried to keep the soldiers and tanks from entering the city. Innocent bystanders died as well. So many were arrested and are still jailed. Others are just considered missing. Some protesters have even found their way here.
All said, it was an awful event. How sad to me is that it could reoccur at any time. Corruption is rampant, and while the average citizen of China has access to more material goods than ever before, their access to the basic freedoms we take for granted is limited. The face Beijing will show at the upcoming Olympics will be a friendly on. However, behind that mask will be citizens locked up in their homes because it is feared that they may try to protest, or somehow show that everything is not as wonderful in the Peoples' Republic as the official voices say it is.
It's hard to believe that many in China do not even know about the Massacre. Here's a link to a newspaper story that just came out today. Information is so controlled still. Things like cell phones and the Internet can change the way people find out things, but progress is slow.
I miss the Chinese people. I miss my students. I miss the friends I made there. I miss so much and yet am ever so thankful that I can live here freely in America, write freely, and worship God freely. Pray for China.

Tiannamen Square

It was eighteen years ago today. While China may be more economically open today, its people are still living under a Communist Regime. They are not free. Let us not forget to pray for our Chinese brothers and sisters.

No Posts

I've been having some computer problems and internet problems. I will hopefully be back to posting soon! Have a great weekend.