Tea in a Saucepan

Today was Cornflower's birthday (see previous post, I'm too lazy to link tonight) and she woke up with a fever, cough and headache. Poor Cornflower. She slept most of the morning.

The rest of us did schoolwork in the morning and scrubbed acrylic paint off the sidewalk in the afternoon. Don't ask.

It doesn't sound like it would be a Keeping Day, does it? But it was.

After dinner tonight, Cornflower and I read the first three chapters of Half-Magic by Edward Eager. As my voice got tired, I realized that I wanted a sweet something. My brilliant mind putting two and two together, I remembered that we had pre-shaped cookie dough in the freezer. Bake and eat!

I suggested we adjourn to the kitchen. Cornflower's sisters quickly figured out what we were about, and before you could say Jack Robinson, the teacups were out and the water in the kettle.

Mariel got the OED and beguiled us into a game of Dictionary.

Cornflower sat down to the piano with her faithful pink frog, and announced that Kermit wanted to perform for us. He accomplished this by propping himself against Cornflower's lap, playing Into the West (from LOTR), Turkey in the Straw and Ode to Joy, and then, for a finale, sat on the couch and played one song by telepathy. (Please pay no attention to the slightly feverish child at the piano.)

While the cookies baked, I steeped the tea in a saucepan. I was not inclined to get out the china teapot (hand-wash only, and I had already reclaimed two sinkloads of dirty dishes) but my dishwasher-safe pitchers were out of commission-- one, made of glass, was cold from being in the fridge, while my plastic pitcher was not yet recovered from being used in the chalk-and-acrylic-paint art/experiment of the day before.

(In case you are wondering, steel wool and water will eventually remove glow-in-the-dark acrylic paint from concrete.)

We ate chocolatey chocolate cookies and drank peppermint tea (ladled out of the saucepan with my crockpot ladle) and tried to stump one another with words such as obreptitious and opsimathy and palliate. We laughed because Aravis is obreptitious and I am a kind of opsimath. And if we had been in charge of word meanings, we would have decided that palliating was the art of painting horses.

Today was a gem. We had illness and tears and leftover mess and a math lesson that took way too long-- and yet, today was Grand. It goes in the vault as a Keeping Day.