An exquisite and elaborate tea party...

my loving and oh so wonderful mother decided it would be grand to send her only granddaughter a book on tea parties. oh not just any tea parties though...ones with suggestions on how to fold napkins and invitations and on and on... i saw it and thought...oh gee...thanks a lot mom! way to heap on the work! but of course annie saw it and loved it. begged me for a couple of weeks to do a tea party called, "in celebration of Little Women..." so i finally sat down and looked it over with her and thought...oh fine! so annie came up with the list of who she wanted to invite and then designed the invitations herself. requesting my help for the cursive that had to be done! then we hand delivered them. then we prepared ourselves for the big day. we made pink lemonade from hand squeezed lemons, petit-fours (which only took an entire bag of powdered sugar which is really hard to come by here and only took about 3 hours in the kitchen), we also made ice cream snowballs...however when you are in iraq...you might have an unexpected power outage resulting in more of a pancake than a ball...but you know you roll with the punches.
but we managed to pull it all together in time for the guests to arrive. we had a mixed crowd of Kurdish women and American women. it was a little awkward, but it was really fun. we had a interesting "discussion" on our favorite books, which i realized as i was asking the question that some of our guests are illiterate...so i was able to quickly add or your favorite film! at any rate it was a great opportunity to discuss my favorite Book! then at the end we gave out little books that are in Kurdish and English with Annie's and my favorite Story.
annie and sweet friend Zeelan! Zeelan is wearing a necklace annie made for her!

The book itself will hopefully remain buried in the book basket for a couple months...while it was fun, it was a lot of work. of course i will be sure to find it and suggest that Annie and her Mimi (my mom) put on a tea party together whenever she comes for a visit! ah...revenge!