Tuesday Teatime

This week it was all about the treats. KidV1 wanted to make Purple Burping Cows from Rachael Ray's Cooking Rocks, so asked if we could please have Tuesday Teatime. So we did. By the way, Purple Burping Cows are "floats" -- like a root beer float, but using grape soda instead of root beer. We used Ben & Jerry's organic vanilla ice cream and Knudsen Fruit Juice Spritzers, mostly because that's what we had. KidV2 tried it and announced that she'd rather eat the ice cream and then have a grape soda some other time -- the whole was less than the sum of its parts.

Anyway, planned poems were: Sunflowers by Heather Thomas, Afternoon on a Hill by Edna St. Vincent Millay, And What is so Rare as a Day in June by James Russell Lowell, and Sumer is Icumen In. We read/listened to the Sumer poem both in Middle English and in modern translation by Kenneth Koch.

Whenever I think of the poem And What is so Rare as a Day in June I think of the old Pogo comic strip where Churchy and Howland Owl discuss this line. And my connection to the Sumer is Icumen In poem is via a class in Middle English linguistics I took back in college (I was a horticulture major, and undoubtably the only one every to take that particular class). So, maybe my kids now associate these poems with Purple Burping Cows, but I have some pretty funky associations myself.