Tuesday Teatime

Menu: We had freshly made brownies to eat. Beverages were a choice of Celestial Seasoning Raspberry Zinger or milk (current household selections are rice milk, cow's milk, coconut milk) served in a china teacup.

Our poetry book of choice was Fairyland in Art and Poetry by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I read the first few poems, and then KidV1 announced that that was enough -- too much poetry at once was hard to digest. Also, I think the brownies were sending us all into glycemic chock. Plus they wanted to get back to listening to the Matilda book-on-CD they had just checked out of the library.

The Fairyland book does contain our current memory verse, and we all recited it together:

"Where the bee sucks, there suck I.
In a cowslip's bell I lie.
There I couch, when owls do cry.
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily....
Merrily, merrily, shall I live now,
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough."

KidV2 had been practicing the poem earlier in the day. It's a tough one for her, containing odd word patterns (also containing correct use of the word "lie" so she will have that blazed into her memory; whereas my own childhood was corrupted by Bob Dylan singing "Lay Lady Lay", which plummeted me into a lifetime of incorrect use of lay and lie). She had to summon up enormous energy to remember each phrase...such energy that the words BURST out of her, and she was reciting at FULL VOLUME.