Tea Parties with your children

ok, tea parties are what I am MOST excited for. I LOVE leisurely/fun activities like this where we can be creative together. I think for me I’ll just see what the kids like to do whether that’s baking together, reading poetry, maybe performing a small speech or doing a skit together? When I was a girl I would have LOVED doing these sorts of things. I actually recruited my sisters for this most of the time and those were my best memories! We would raid thrift stores and pick out “dress up” dresses with pretty gloves and hats to wear.

Maybe as a focus for each one you do you can discuss a special social skill that is to be used at social gatherings (such as active listening, graciousness, helping with the cleanup, etc)

I think it’s also special for girls to enjoy beautiful things and for little boys to see how a girl can really act like a lady, especially at this time. And perhaps your boy could practice his gentlemanly skills during this time too. You could talk about how men are to act chivalrous (and even incorporate the verse about the wife being the precious vessel)…..oh the ideas are so plentiful in my head!

Overall, just keep it fun and let the kids create and then you can throw in those educational and character building moments along the way.

Being English tea is important in our house for me and the girls…however we did not go overboard with our tea parties.  I have a lovely tea set but rarely use it, I have some antique German cups and saucers too, and we use those on occasion, but mostly we just make our tea in a tea pot, and we have homemade cookies or cakes and sit and chat…with maybe some nice flowers on the table.  I grew up with this too….if I wanted posh I would go to the Ritz in London for tea, which I have done…but I prefer the more down to earth version we do at home, and most English people don’t go in for elaborate tea parties at home either, though a lot of people in the US seem to think we do: )) So relax, it it more to do with the social interaction than making everything look perfect and posh, we often now drink ours out of mugs, very nice mugs, but mugs just the same: )) Live life and don’t get bogged down in unecessary stuff, life is too short: )))

We have tea occasionally. My dd loves tea parties, and I enjoy them with adults but I’m learning to enjoy them with children. 😉 I do like “fancy” things: I enjoy dressing up, wearing heels, collecting china, nice table linens. That’s just me though. For dd’s Christmas, we started a collection for her of nice dishes, including a tea pot, creamer, sugar, and four teacups with saucers. We plan to add cake stands, plates, the pitcher, and other pieces as she grows so that when she has a home of her own she will have the things she needs for entertaining or hosting. If you’re interested in what her set is, go to Amazon and search Pip Studio. It’s super cute stuff!

We like peppermint tea: just dried peppermint leaves steeped in water, so there’s no caffeine. Sometimes we might add dried lavender or rose hips. Ds and I don’t take milk or cream in our tea, but dd does. And we all use stevia or honey to sweeten. Sometimes we will have some grain-free cookies (if I already have them made; I rarely make special cookies just for tea), but usually it’s just the tea. We don’t read anything special, usually whatever book we happen to be in at the time. I find that the actual sitting and having tea is the easy part; getting myself worked up and excited to do it with the kids and giving myself the time to sit and just have tea is the hard part. 😉

W2f, that sounds awesome! So glad your first tea part worked out well!

If you want to be creative and do a firends party or one with just your kiddos, try making cream cheese & jam sandwiches and use small cookie cutters to make finger sandwiches, apples with cheese cut in fun shapes or peanut butter & yogurt dip, and herbal tea.  It’s easy, it can be used for a real meal depending upon how much you need – so a lunch time tea works well.

Here is a fun little tea pot that is on Amazon. Here’s another. Here is a fun set – pot, sugar, creamer, and cups. And maybe for a birthday or other gift, you might consider something like this grey & yellow set, this polka dot set, or this polka dot set.  The first two make me think of Alice in Wonderland, and the last one has a print that is fun much like the second set.

Enjoy!

The teapots I linked are ones in which you would add the water.  If I understand correctly, after you’ve heated your water on the stove, you sould warm your teapot with a bit of water, and then dump that bit which has cooled as the pot itself warmed.  Then add a bit of water and the teabag(s)/infuser and allow to steep for your desired tea strength, then fill the pot totally up.  Sometimes we do this, and sometimes we just add it all at once and go from there.