Tuesday Teatime

This week we had an astronomy teatime since we are studying astronomy for science.

Our poetry selections were about space and planets. I read High Flight by John Gillespie Magee, Jr. and The Star by Jane Taylor. Other poems included Fiona Macleod's The Lost Star, William Cullen Bryant's Hymn to the North Star, Christina Rossetti's O Lady Moon, and an anonymous limerick ("There was a young lady called Bright/Who could travel much faster than light./She set off one day/In a relative way/And came back the previous night."), and Peter Bateson's Nightfall.

The biggest hits were The Star (because it was familiar), the limerick (because limericks are funny; even if you don't understand them, the rhythm seems silly), and O Lady Moon (Rosetti is familiar, plus it's short and a handy bit of knowledge -- it talks about which way the moon's horns face depending on whether it is waxing or waning). The least favorite was Hymn to the North Star ("Thou" and 'thy" stuff? yuck!).

Our menu included Astronaut ice cream, which is the freeze-dried neopolitan ice cream they sell at science museums and Rainbow Resource. If you've never had it, it's ... interesting. A tip -- dipping it into hot tea doesn't reconstitute it into ice cream. I suppose we should've had Tang to drink, but I think the ice cream was enough weirdness for one day. What's funny about the food choice is that I'm on a raw kick right now, trying to up the amount of raw food we're consuming. The ice cream seems like the polar opposite of raw, whole foods. We sort of had the alpha and omega of the food spectrum yesterday.

We used a star-shaped candle we had poured during our Candlemas candlemaking extravaganza, and even the napkins had stars, moon and sun on them.

Of course, KidV2 spent most of the teatime contemplating the idea that we need to have a "weather" teatime. She's quite concerned about what snacks we could have that would be weather-themed. She spent most of the teatime discussing this idea.

I've discovered that it isn't important whether the individual teatimes are successful. What's important is the cumulative effect of doing this each week. There are many reasons for this, but let me share one example: Saturday night I discovered that KidV1 was sitting in her room reading poetry aloud to KidV2. They were looking through Once Upon a Poem , which is full of poems that tell stories. That's something I didn't really expect to see going on in our house -- gathering around to share poetry for entertainment on a Saturday night.