Celebrating with Swan Lake

Mary Ashley's recent birthday brought a different type of celebration for our family.

For her 11th birthday, Mary Ashley decided she would most like to have her best friend since kindergarten, Emma Cate, spend the weekend with us.

As a culmination of their special time together, we planned an outing to the ballet. Lunch before the performance got us girls in the mood to see Swan Lake.

This teapot and feathers helped set the tone for the festivities.

After lunch we headed downtown for the show.

These sweet girls had such a good time together! I will be sharing portraits of them in my next post.

The show was lovely, and a highlight for the girls was having their photo taken with one of the ballerinas.

Look for more photos and details from our pre-ballet lunch in my next post.

"Swan Lake is the most difficult thing to portray for a female ballet dancer; it really requires such specific qualities of articulation, agility, strength, and the arm work is something that takes a lot of training." ~ Benjamin Millepied

Sharing My Cup of Tea

I hope you will join me on the Victoria blog today, where I am sharing my love for British costume dramas, along with this delicious teatime recipe for Special-Delivery Fruit Tarts. Find my post here.

We celebrated Mary Ashley's birthday over the weekend, so I will share the details of our Swan Lake festivities in upcoming posts!

January Roses

"People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us." ~ Iris Murdoch

Happy New Year! Can anything brighten the day more than fresh flowers? Especially during these wintry days, when the daylight is scarce but the sniffles are plentiful, a lovely bouquet can bring a much-needed ray of sunlight.

I recently added a link to my sidebar for The Bouqs, an innovative florist that takes the hassle and expense from online ordering. For a flat fee of  $40, send a fresh-cut bouquet anywhere in the United States. Flowers are cultivated in the nutrient-rich volcanic soil of Ecuador and shipped directly from the grower to the recipient.

The company sent me a complimentary bouquet, and these luscious peach roses lasted nearly two weeks. The photos in this post were taken a full week after I received them.

Within a few weeks, our attentions will turn to Valentine's Day and the floral gifts we so often associate with this most romantic of holidays, but I would suggest that the quiet days of January are actually the perfect time for an unexpected bouquet. If you are craving a little beauty in the new year, I invite you to find a garden of fresh blooms at The Bouqs.

"I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck." ~ Emma Goldman