Between Seasons Luncheon

Good morning, sweet friends! I had a post about adoption in the works for this week but since an adoption post requires more thought than my usual posts about recipes or cleaning, I’ll need a little longer to finish it. So instead, I’ll go ahead and share some photos from a little “grandmother luncheon” my daughter and I hosted last Saturday.

Each year, we like to have our children help with something special for Grandparent’s Day! This year my daughter and I prepared a girly luncheon just for the grandmothers while my husband and son took my dad to a downtown restaurant overlooking the river which serves the ultimate “guy food”–burgers, wings, fries, etc.

It can be hard to plan a menu or set a table when you have one foot stepping towards fall and the other hanging back in summer! My solution was to gently blend the two seasons with nods to each. I picked up some varying shades of pink flowers but didn’t know until the day of how I’d use them. I was looking for a vase to arrange them in and noticed the lovely pumpkins on my table that my friend, Lisa, gave me. She grew them! I was planning to cook them into a puree for fall pies but noticed the morning of the luncheon that they were just starting to spot on the bottom. I’d waited too long to cook them, so I quickly made one into a flower vase–something I used to do each fall. With the pumpkin being a soft, almost pinkish orange, it looked very pretty with my late summer flowers in pink tones.

The night before our luncheon, my daughter and I decided to use these pink and green floral dishes that I refer to as “her china”, not because they’re real china, but because these were her special dishes that she got for her 8th birthday! When she turned 8 years old (she’s almost 18 now!), she wanted a colonial tea, and it was such a fun little party. We had traditional tea and tasties, made orange pomanders, and taught the girl’s some colonial dances. I made mob caps for each of the girls, and they were so cute sipping tea and dancing in their caps! My daughter picked out the dishes from Burlington as part of her birthday gift and they are sweetly and simply feminine, perfect for 8-year-old birthday girls or grandmothers!

The napkins are just as special as the dishes but for another reason and another daughter. When my married daughter was turning 16, I planned a luncheon for her and the ladies in our family. She asked for a PINK party which was funny because she’d never been a very pinky girl, but she was totally feeling it for her Sweet Sixteen! We had fun picking out decorations, flowers, and fabric. I made the cloth napkins you see in these photos with a pink polka dot fabric she selected. We’ve gotten so much use out of them since then and using the napkins was like having a little remembrance of her with us since she’s in Texas now.

If you’ve known me for a while you might be surprised to hear that I’m enjoying simpler table settings these days without as many layers as I used to create. That’s probably mostly due to time, but also because I’m just appreciating simplicity in everything.

So, back to our theme: Between Seasons. I’ve been thinking about this place a good bit lately. You see, I am living between life seasons. I think that at age 48 I’m somewhere between the summer and fall seasons of my life (leaning more towards fall than summer). I’m also between seasons in my parenting–a daughter married, a daughter in high school, and then all the way down to a son in elementary. I’m currently stretched between my first little birdy leaving the nest while still planning play dates for my son. But you know what? I feel so blessed to be enjoying these different seasons at once, even as exhausting as it is!

As I was pulling the table together Saturday morning, I realized that the other ladies are also between life seasons. The grandmothers are somewhere between fall and winter season while my daughter whose high school graduation is around the corner is just beginning to grow out of spring towards her summer season! So, we’ll all just enjoy our in-betweenness of seasons to the fullest.

In my next post I’ll share our Between Seasons menu and recipes, but here is a sneak peak of our soup course: Rosy Raspberry Soup! Oh my, it was so good. You’ll definitely want this recipe!