Tuesday Teatime

Kid2 appeared in the kitchen yesterday morning brandishing all the small poems and fourteen more by Valerie Worth. I told her that I wasn't going to read it aloud at the moment since I was about to eat breakfast, but, hey, it's Tuesday! How about we have a Tuesday Teatime?

She danced out of the room, re-entering a few minutes later to announce that she'd found a poem that she wanted to share at our teatime -- Sea Lions. She had pre-read it, and could read all the words (at age 6 she still finds some words rather shifty and prone to playing tricks on her).

Gratuitous picture of our dining room:



It spent most of July in a jumble of drop cloths and icky sticky bits of wallpaper. Two layers of wallpaper were removed, taking off some of the drywall with it. Drywall was repaired, ceiling was repaired (former owners were quite fond of massive draperies that hung by bolts from the ceiling), walls painted, ceiling painted, queer assortment of electrical outlets replaced. We still need to rip up the ugly grey carpet, install a wood floor, purchase a rug and a sane window treatment ... but in the meantime, it's actually usable as a place to have tea.

I had a niggling feeling there was some festival yesterday or today. A quick look at our plethora of festival books showed that it was Lammas, which is also Loaf-mass. Well, it was waaay too hot to bake a loaf of bread to celebrate the beginning of the harvest, so we stopped by Trader Joe's and got a Lemon Crown Cake and a bottle of pineapple juice -- both were a golden yellow that put me in mind of the end of summer.

Kid2 led off our teatime with her reading of Sea Lions. Next, I shared some of the information I had found on Lammas. One of the sources I read noted that bees were busy this time of year, so it seemed quite appropriate to read The Queen Bee from The Brothers Grimm. That led naturally to reading the poem Hurt No Living Thing by Christina Rosetti. I also read How Doth the Little Busy Bee by Isaac Watts, and Go to the Ant from the Bible (all three selections found in Favorite Poems Old and New ).

Next, I read a version of the Sumerian myth of Inanna and her trip to the Underworld, which bears a resemblance to the tale of Persephone and Hades.

After the story was finished, Kid2 gave us a reprise of Sea Lions. This time she concentrated on reading it "poetically".

A great start to another season of teatimes!