Saturday morning was our Daisy Scouts Tea Party. There was a lot of care and preparation put into it and it came off without a hitch! The few days leading up to it I was very, very nervous. I'm finding that volunteering (in this case as a Daisy leader along with my poor co-leaders I strong-armed politely asked) is difficult. Before, whenever I've volunteered for something it's always been for a couple hours or a one time event. Never an ongoing 2nd and 4th Tuesdays of the month plus extra activities sort of deal. There is a lot of time and work involved not only in doing the activities but in the planning. But that's not the difficult part. The difficult part is trying to keep the parents happy.
I really don't enjoy getting phone calls from parents about complaints that are not really in my realm of 'things I can fix.' It's very hard to stay calm and polite and say all the right things when I really want to shout "Hey look! I'm doing the best I can and I'm just a volunteer and if you would have read the newsletter I send home with your daughter after each and every meeting detailing precisely what we are doing/will be doing you would know what is going on!!!" or "Hey! I'm just volunteering and trying my best and it's not my fault your daughter doesn't like the snack some other girl brought that week for the troop!!!" or even, once, "Hey!!! @#%$^#@$!!!!" <----That one was really unkind of me to think.
Anyway, I digress. I just needed to get that off my chest. Back to the tea party and don't mind the mix-match of chairs. My dining room table is very large but we only have 6 chairs and we had 11 girls.
Our other girl was sick with strep throat so the girls made her a get well poster. Each girl drew a picture and wrote her name on it and after the tea party Maia and I took the poster plus a plate of tea party food, necklaces and her tea cup with flower to her house. She wasn't home when we got there and we had to leave the items on the stoop and leave a message on the answering machine. I'm a little worried because it ended up raining that afternoon. I hope she got them in time!
Originally I wanted to thrift all of the items but going out of town and all that awful soreness left me unable to properly scrounge around. The lace runner, the silver piece holding the cupcakes, the small tea cups with their matching saucers on top of them and one of the teapots were all thrifted. Can you guess which teapot? We ended up finding the rest of the teacups and saucers at a local craft store.
The menu was heart shaped peanut butter sandwiches on extra thin bread, sliced cucumbers and carrots, cheese cracker crisps, sliced strawberries and white cupcakes with strawberry frosting. The 'tea' was apple juice.
All of the girls came dressed in their best 'tea party' dresses and the hats we made at our Daisy Scout meeting the previous Tuesday. We had picked up some fun, shiny necklaces for the girls to put on when they arrived. Feather boas would have been fantastic--except they cost $10 and $15 a boa and that was out of budget. =(
After tea, Miss Sami, Maeve's mom, read Miss Spider's Tea Party to the girls while Missy, Amanda and I quickly prepped for the activity.
When we were ready, each girl put on a shirt from Mom or Dad that they had brought along to protect their dresses and we all went out to the deck. Then, everyone got to plant a sunny yellow marigold in their teacup to take home.
By the way, I have many cute pictures of our whole tea party; unfortunately I had to make copies of the pictures and crop everyone out because I'm not going to post pictures of other people's children without permission. I say unfortunately because the pictures are really cute!
When it was time to go, all of the girls assembled on the front porch to have their picture taken in all of their finery. It was also a time that the girls got really loud and giggly but I think they needed it since they had been practicing their good manners during the tea party. As each girl departed she was given a chocolate daisy covered pretzel as a parting gift and she also got to take home a balloon.
Somehow, we managed not to send any balloons sailing off into the sky!
