xTEAalidocious

Grammy Pammy's "exTEAalidocious" was the 4th tea party my husband and I hosted at the end of the summer of 2013. This year will be our sixth. My husband is a former youth pastor and since we were unable to have kids of our own, we poured ourselves into other peoples' kids' lives and were abundantly blessed! There are a bunch that we are still close with, and their children have now become our "grandchildren".

The Mary Poppins theme was a particularly fun one because I wanted to use the colors and theme from the scene when they jump into the chalk drawing of a park and end up on a Carousel. Many of the little girls had never even seen Mary Poppins - can you imagine?! So Mary's beautiful red and white dress with her pink and white parasol became the main colors, and Bert's striped jacket and tiffany blue bow tie became the ancillary colors.

In picking out my flowers, I went to our wholesale flower store the morning before the party and thankfully they had the perfect ruffly carnations in pink/white and red/white combinations. That, and a lot of baby's breath looked so pretty. I made all my flower arrangements the day before as well as decorated and set out all my serving stuff the night before.

I used my mom's table runners and dresser scarves that my grandmother had made for her when she got married. It was fun to use old linens. I have a collection of teapots and a couple of them are from England (given to me as gifts) so I used those for the tea.

We hung white parasols from our living room ceiling and they were then given out to the girls after the tea and eating were finished, and they had fun wandering around our backyard, er, garden with the parasols acting like proper young ladies. Also made for darling pictures.

I ordered the teacups and saucers online from Teacups and Roses and the gift bags were from Toot Suite but I don't think you can buy directly from them anymore. I like to use clear plates (can usually get pretty plastic patterned ones from places like Walmart) so as not to distract from the rest of the table setting and the napkins were plain sky blue. The little teaspoons I found at a local Asian store - they have so much fun and relatively inexpensive stuff!

There were also lots of butterflies because in the theme scene, Mary sniffs a bouquet of flowers from Burt, and the flowers turn into butterflies. (Was always one of my very favorite scenes as a little girl).

That's a lot of details - hope you enjoy the pics and that they were good enough quality to see how much fun we have here in SoCal. :-)

• What People Ate

  We had lots of mini scones baked fresh that morning from a local bakery, finger sandwiches that were lovingly made by helpful friends, amazingly decorated butterfly and parasol cookies as well as spoonful of sugar cakepops made by one of my girls, and other assorted fun sweets like candy sticks in the appropriate colors and M&M's and foil wrapped candy in apothecary jars that I had purchased after Valentine's Day on sale ;-).

• What People Drank

  Hot tea with lots of sugar and cream and Rum Punch or iced tea for the mommies.

• Desserts

  sugar cookies, cake pops, meringues, assorted candy

• Party Favors

  pink and white striped gift bags with lip gloss in ice cream flavors, tea bags, kisses, a package of sidewalk chalk, little butterfly clips to put in their hair AND they got to take their cup and saucer and spoon home with them.

• Activities / Games

  drawing on the patio with chalk, walking around the garden with their parasols, taking pictures