honeyflake

rehearsing

dim sum

today our family had an outing that was inspired by a really sweet book called dumpling days, which recently came home with margaret and i from our local library. it is a book we found in the children's chapter book section, but i could not help taking a turn in reading it myself. the story takes place in taiwan and is filled with description after description of all the food that the main character encounters while she is there — and dumplings in some form or another are a re-occuring theme. for days both margaret and i found ourselves bringing up food from the book in conversation — like the bubble tea, the dim sum, the chicken feet and especially the special "soup filled" dumplings!!! yeah. so you know it wasn't long before we all planned an afternoon in chinatown, nyc.

chuck, margaret and i chose a vintage tea parlor,  whose menu was almost straight from the pages of our recent read. with a little jasmine tea to start things off, all three of us picked a few small dishes to share (you can be sure there were soup dumplings for margaret)... and waited for these "little bits of heart" to start appearing on our checkered-cloth-covered table... four dumplings on a little blue plate here, four dumplings in a little tin steamer there... yum. it was all very exciting and delicious. 

afterwards, we took some time to walk around the busy streets of chinatown, where we found one more culinary stand out from the book that we couldn't forget - some bubble tea!!! a really fun way to cap off this literary-inspired adventure of ours. and we'll certainly put a bookmark here on this day so that we may return again.

with a few brushes and tubes of paint

an underwater sea turtle happily appeared in our living room today... it peacefully and somewhat effortlessly emerged onto margaret's blank canvas along with a vast amount of clear, open, nicley blended, blue water. perfectly capturing this little window of springtime calm and relaxation we have here this week (also known as spring beak!!).