My good friend, Kelly, invited Sadie and I to a mother/daughter tea party at the Winnie Palmer Nature Reserve. (Don't worry, there were no politics involved. This was the old fashioned, fancy-hat and dress kind of tea party)
The nature reserve is located on a strip of what used to be farmland between St. Vincent College and Rt 981(?) I'm really bad with street names but it's across from the Dairy Queen in Latrobe and I think it's a beautiful spot. There's an old barn and lots of trails and growing things to look at. And on a side note, Winnie Palmer was the wife of golfing great, Arnie Palmer and it was her idea to preserve this land from being commercially developed. She also passed away some years ago from uterine cancer (the same that Mona had) and sadly wasn't able to see the fulfillment of her idea. It's still a beautiful spot and it looks like it will be offering much more to the community.
The tea party started at 10AM so that meant we couldn't have our usual leisurely Saturday morning. We needed to be up and dressed and out the door by 9. Fortunately, the kids were up early and we made it out there in time. Sadie happily wore her Easter dress and tennis shoes (I know better than to try and put dress shoes on this girl). Unfortunately, the little princess had a very busy Friday, no nap, up until 10PM Friday night and up at 7ish the next morning. This made for a grump instead of a princess. We arrived before our friends and I thought we could walk on the trails and take some pictures. My dare-devil child strangely decided to be afraid of the walking trails including the little 6 ft path through the butterfly garden. She completely flipped out and cried any time I tried to take her away from the front of the barn.
Kelly and her daughter arrived and we went in for tea. The tables were really cute with little flower vases and bowls of sugar cubes and miss-matched tea cups and saucers. The girls were happy to sit down and begin pretending to sip their tea.
Tea was served shortly with finger sandwiches, cookies and strawberries. Sadie got to have some lemonade from her tea cup (she's not a fan of tea) and she tried her first PB and J sandwich. Yep, she's had more peanut butter sandwiches than I could count but never ventured to add jelly to that and you would have thought that I was asking her to try brussel sprouts with the resistance I got to the PB and J but somehow she managed to get down 2 sandwiches. I did have to rely on bribing her with a cookie though.
She made it through the tea without having too many tragedies. There was the incident with the ice in her lemonade. I couldn't get over the tears from the little girl for having to eat an ice cube... but all was well once the rest of the ice cubes were removed from her lemonade. Then she split her lip. Truly, it's not a successful tea party until you've got blood on your party dress... It wasn't bad and we've actually gotten used to this happening. Sadie's chipped tooth is very sharp and often does some damage when she bumps her mouth. She was walking back to our table and simply bumped into a chair. I never thought that it would result in blood but sure enough, her upper lip was cut and bleeding. We put some ice on it and she had a drink of water and we were pretty much done.
We took the girls out for a little walk and then it was time to say good bye. It was a really cute event and I hope we can do it again next year.
