Tea Time

The cooler fall weather allowed to me having a tea party with my kids today.

No, not because it's too hot to drink tea in the summer or because we're too busy at the playground to be bothered with such indoorsy silliness. It's way less direct than that.

In the summer, we sleep in the basement. It's lovely. It's cool and dark and way more welcoming than the stuffy upstairs bedrooms. The downside, unfortunately, is that the open layout of our house makes it so that any noises on the main floor (like children shrieking during a sock war for example) are also quite loud in the basement. It also meant that Angel the wild kitten was able to go downstairs at the slightest hint of a sleeping body in order to "snuggle" (AKA "Purr as loudly as possible until the sleeping thing wakes up")

Olivia usually naps twice a day. These naps usually look something like this:

The smoochy snuggly sleeper is truly delicious like nothing else. But she's getting big. I know, calling my skinny baby big is rather amusing, but she used to look a lot more like this:

(Please note the bad wrapping job. See what you learn in a year of wrapping?)

Anyhow back to the tea party. Well, almost. So yeah, this baby of mine couldn't sleep in the noisy basement all summer. And she was getting bigger and bigger which made it harder to get things done during her wrap-naps. Sometimes I did manage to get her transferred up onto my back once she'd nursed to sleep:

(This one is a good wrapping job, despite her wonky head. Promise! She had neck support right up her whole neck. Plus if I tried to lay her head down flat and tuck it under the wrap she got angry.)

Anyhow yeah. So the tea party. So since it's cool enough that we have the beds back upstairs into actual bedrooms with actual doors, I can now put the sleeping baby up in bed during her naps. It's quiet, the cat can't jump on her face, and I can actually move around at a normal person's speed, not the speed of someone trying not to crang her sleeping baby's head on a wall while mopping.

During this morning's nap I got a whole pile of cleaning done which meant that during this afternoon's nap when Lily asked if we could have a tea party I was able to say "Yes! Let's get some water boiling!" rather than "I really wish I could but the table is covered in crap and the dishes are all dirty and I don't have the time for that right now." (Do I sound like one of those Ikea commercials yet?)

So my afternoon looked a whole bunch like this:

And this:

And this:

It was really really great. Nick and Lily so often have to wait for things or just plain not do things because of Olivia and it was really special to just sit with them and drink tea and visit. There's a part of my heart that is sad that Olivia's napping in bed rather than in the wrap, but it's balanced out in knowing that she was more than ready and I now have these new opportunities to be alone with the big kids. And judging by the looks on their faces as they doctored up their cups of tea, the party was just as big a hit with them as it was with me.