Two Little Birds, Two Little Beasts: Disaster Tea

Well, yesterday's tea was a bit of a challenge! I should begin by saying that our guests were lovely and perfect (giving you an idea of where this may lead). Sorry for the extraneous exclamation points, but they are necessary to capture how it felt. I barely survived. :) Clara peed on a chair for the first time! (After just having peed in the potty ten minutes earlier). Five minutes later she peed on a rug for the first time! Ten minutes later she peed on the floor! (Perhaps a bit too much milk consumption that morning). She drank the water from her flower vase! She took off her underwear in front of everyone! She screeched! She put her feet on the table! She ran around like a mad woman! She pinched a guest! She would not share her toys! She dumped over the bowl of water at the washbasin! I'm sure there was more, or at least it felt like it. WHAT A DAY! Let's hope it was an aberration and not a preview of things to come. To further add to the chaos, the phone rang like crazy all morning (no one ever calls us, it was really weird) and I ended up turning the oven off or never really turned it on or something, so that when I went to put our soufflé-like Dutch Baby pancake in the oven after its little time on the stove, the oven was off. I had to wait the 15 min. for the oven to preheat before I could put it in--not the best conditions for something so delicate. Clara and I were both exhausted by the end--she went down for her nap early about ten minutes after everyone left. Truthfully, I had a little cry, mainly due to embarassment. I'm over it now. :)

On a more positive note, it was a fun tea to prepare as it was our first gluten-free adventure. We have several small friends who don't do so well with wheat or gluten, so I feel like it's important to have some things in our repertoire to fix for them. I used The Petit Appetit Cookbook for everything this week--it's great because it has little symbols on each recipe to tell you if it's gluten-free, vegan, sugar-free, wheat-free, egg-free, vegetarian, etc. It makes it so much easier to select things for guests' particular needs.

Here's Clara preparing 'Crunchy Frozen Bananas,' which are a super-easy thing for toddlers to make and a good alternative to popsicles. Clara only ended up making one since she got really into eating the cereal and I couldn't keep her on task or keep her hands clean enough to prepare food, but I think on another day she'd get really into it. You basically dip 1/2 a banana on a skewer (I trimmed off the sharp end) into yogurt and then roll it in a cereal or other tasty/healthy item, then freeze it.

She also helped whisk the eggs and milk and then to stir in the flour and salt for the Lemon Dutch Baby, an egg pancake that puffs up in the oven (if you turn the oven on).

Here are the frozen banana treats and some "Bran New Macaroons," which are cookies made with egg white, brown sugar, cinnamon and oat bran (that's it!)

And here are some photos of what was by far the best part of the morning, our darling guests. Thanks, friends, for putting up with us on what may have been our worst toddler day ever! :) And thanks, Dena, for the yummy fruit!