A Wee Tea

Except, hold the tea ~ cold milk washed down the cookies much better. :)

Today, or rather, tonight, is Burns Night in Scotland, when that nation celebrates the birthday of the beloved poet, Robert Burns. This was a perfect excuse to make delicous shortbread for Thursday tea! Plus, I'm part Scottish so it's my ancestral obligation.

"O, my luve is like a red, red rose,

That's newly sprung in June.

O, my luve is like a melodie,

That's sweetly play'd in tune."

I also sang a bit of Auld Lang Syne, fully expecting the boys to recognize that song. They just stared at me blankly. (Of course, it could have been my singing.)

And to be perfectly frank, the shortbread was a bit of a miss - I'm the only one who truly enjoyed it, lol! I put too much butter in the ridiculously easy recipe (three ingredients, how could I have gone wrong?) and it never really baked all the way through. It may have been too moist to be authentic, but it was delicious. Here's a link to the recipe, which I will try again sometime soon.

I set the table with our beeswax Celtic cross candle (which I never burn - it's too lovely!), our Waterford votive (which my folks brought home from Ireland) and my "homegrown" thistle (Scotland's national flower) in a vase. This was a last minute idea - just lavender tissue paper folded and snipped into a thistle shape (more or less) and wrapped with green tissue which I snipped into spear shapes (for leaves). A rubber band held the whole thing together atop a pipe cleaner stem. Very humble, but kind of fun!

We read aloud from Magnifikid while we munched on our cookies. OK, I muched on the cookies - the boys pecked at the cotton candy leftover from yet another failed experiment - edible owl pellets.

Yep, you read that right. Edible owl pellets.

Well, this warrants some explaining. It was going to be a really neat edible craft project to tie into our owl study (I couldn't wait to tell Meredith) but it was, well, not so neat. Happily, though, it was edible.

I found the idea in Small Wonders: Nature Education for Young Children (an otherwise terrific book). It sounded so clever on paper - just wrap small pretzel sticks with cotton candy and shape them to look like owl pellets. According to the instructions ...

"When you serve the "pellets" to the children, be sure to tell them to pull the "fur" apart and look for "bones" before eating the whole thing."

Now who says I don't serve boy-friendly tea? ;)

Anyhoo - it just didn't work out for us. The cotton candy just wouldn't stay wrapped around the pretzel bits, try as we might. It didn't bother the boys much - they were just tickled they were getting cotton candy at all!

Well, I spent the rest of the afternoon taking pictures of our learning room and my lesson planning in action. I will try to post about all that sometime tomorrow. :)

For now, Good night and God Bless!