I’m officially taking a break from Project 365. I’ve done it for several years, and I have enjoyed it. But. I think less is more can also apply to digital noise. And though I sometimes have great stories to tell, I don’t have great stories to tell every day. As you well know. This particularly applies to work days. I *cannot* take pictures at work. And no matter how great a story I have about what happened at work, it has to stay at work. So. Moving on.

I have a Facebook friend who frequently posts pictures of her afternoon tea. I found myself getting envious. I mean, to take time out of the day and prepare delectable edibles, steep an actual pot of tea, and reconnect with family? And serve it on pretty dishes? Who does that??? SHE does that. And I wanted to do it, too. So I did. Here we are having tea. At 6:30 pm. But we had tea yesterday.

And we will have tea again!

“Cass! You know tea is served in the afternoon, not in the evening! What ails you?” Well, it happened like this. Jasmine came out of her room yesterday and said, “Since we are all home can we do a thing?” Now, I had a list of errands to run and really did not feel like dragging the kids with me to do them. But she was right, we are rarely all home for an entire day. I decided to take them on the errands and go get some lunch. One of the errands was to drop off things at the thrift store. And I started thinking. About tea things.

Now, I decided many years ago that I didn’t want anything in our home that I would yell at a kid for accidentally damaging. I don’t mean willful destruction. I mean fair wear and tear, and that includes dropping dishes now and again. Hell, I dropped a plate myself last weekend and broke it into four pieces. Anyway, with the exception of Grandmother’s rocking chair, which I keep in my room, I’ve held to that. I wanted pretty tea things to have elegant tea, but I knew I couldn’t go buy a tea set because I’d be mad if a piece were damaged.

But there we were. At the thrift store. Where they sell things. So, I looked at the children and said, “okay, we’re going in. We are going straight to the back. Don’t get distracted. We’re only going in that one section.” So we did. We decided we weren’t going to go with sets, necessarily. It just had to be pretty, and actual china. That first store had quite a few things. And then we went to a second thrift store where we picked up a few more. And then a third.

Tea was served at 6:30 pm, because we got home at 4:30, and it took me a bit of time to get it all washed, dried, and put away, even with Jasmine helping. We ended up with 20 cups, and I didn’t count the saucers and such. I ended up putting about half of it in the cabinet instead of on the shelf as you see it above. I discovered when I went to get the pieces I wanted to use that it was packed too tightly to be accessible. So now I have pretty tea things, and if a piece gets broken it’s no big deal because it won’t mess up my “set.” I’ll just pull a replacement down from the cabinet. When I run out of replacements, I will just go back to the thrift store.