Snapshots: Valentines and a Tea Party

If you know me at all, this picture will shock you:

If you even know what you're looking at, that is.

I always make the kids make their own Valentine's cards for their classmates, which most years are nothing but folded pieces of construction paper with "To:" and "From:" inside. My boys are NOT into making valentines, and I'm not willing to press the issue. We stick these bare-bones cards onto bags containing a crispy rice treat and call it good. 

However! 

Some sort of madness overtook me this year, and in an effort to make it more fun (for them, not me), I let them choose paper from a giant box of origami paper my sister gave Cubby (thanks, sis!) AND I carved a heart out of a potato and let them potato-stamp with paint. 

They were pretty wonky-looking hearts, to be honest, but the kids did find it fun. It took a lot longer than just writing names in the unadorned cards, though, and the reasons I dislike crafts with four children of various ages were again made clear, but it's done. 

My Christmas gift from A. this year was a blender, since I have not had a functioning blender in, uh, four years.

But not just any blender!

It's a PARTY BLENDER.

I mostly use blenders in the summer, so it sat in the box for awhile, waiting for a party. Finally I asked A. to get the ingredients for margaritas, because you know what makes this a party blender?

Pick your poison.

I laughed pretty hard when I saw the button labels up there, but I did dutifully use the "margarita" button, and it did make margaritas. It's been years since I've had a margarita--maybe as many years as I've had a non-functioning blender?--and they were delicious, but WOAH, I forgot how strong margaritas are.

The children had a much more temperate party of their own yesterday when Cubby asked me if he could make some cream tea. Poppy had been asking for a tea party, and I told her we needed to wait for her brothers to be home to make it an actual party. So when Cubby asked for tea on a snowy Saturday, I figured it was a sign.

Our tea parties are much more humble than the elegant affairs Grandma used to have for the children when we lived at Blackrock, a house with more than its share of tea cups, pots, saucers, sugar bowls, and cream jugs.  I don't have the room to store any of that stuff, and anyway, all the important elements were there, if not elegantly presented:

Food, cream, sugar, mugs, tea strainer, and tea in a pot (mostly white tea, with one black tea bag for flavor).

I was, of course, reminded by one of the children that Grandma used to make cookies or scones for tea parties. To which I responded that I would take away the apples, cheese, and spiced nuts if they deemed that inappropriate for their tea party. They elected to eat them. And they very much enjoyed their cream and sugar with token amounts of tea.

I don't have a new morning walk picture because, thanks to weekend activities involving teacher in-service and homecoming at school, I have not been taking a morning walk. But since it snowed Friday night, it looks just like this old picture I took a couple of weeks ago:

Sorry, dogs. Maybe next weekend.

There you have it! My life, snapshotted.