Pick your poison.

I have mentioned a few times my love of Earl Grey tea. I drink copious amounts of the lovely leaf, but up until this year I never fancied myself a tea drinker. Everyone would always offer me tea and I would almost always turn it down. The only hot drink I've ever really liked was coffee and even then, I would often let it cool right down before drinking it.  But when my stomach started rejecting coffee after Haven was born, I discovered my love of black tea (herbal tea is still not my thing). 


My love affair with caffeinated beverages began in my late twenties. Until then, I never touched the stuff and it's funny because I spent a great deal of my late teens and early twenties working in coffee shops and cafes that served espresso. In fact, my first full-time job after leaving home (I had several part-time jobs while I still lived at home) was as a barista in a coffee shop. Yes, it is odd, even wrong to be served espresso by a person who has never really tasted the stuff. By the time I started up with the bean, my barista days were long behind me.

I went through a few phases with coffee. For the longest time, I drank it black. Straight up. Purist. But slowly, I switched to lattes (for goodness sake, no foam, please) and my drip coffee also became milky, and then soy-milky once I became a vegan.


With tea, I love my soy milk and I even add a little vanilla flavoured soy-milk creamer. Straight up and purist? Well, it's a straight-up blasphemy to my former purist self. Apparently I have become a nancy-pants and I'm okay with that.

I was pouring an extra-milky, pansy-assed-flavoured cup of tea recently and I suddenly remembered kneeling on a chair at our kitchen table when I was around five-years old. It was evening and I think I had just come out of a bath. I was wearing a nightgown. My Mom had a friend over and they were having tea. She poured me about half a cup of very weak Orange Pekoe and filled the rest of the mug with milk. I think the idea was to limit the amount of caffeine, but also cool it down enough so I wouldn't burn myself. I remember stirring a heaping teaspoon of white sugar into the cup and taking a big, long slurp. Heaven. My Mom laughed and said that I should enjoy it, since she didn't want me drinking more than one cup. The sugar alone was enough to get me wired, let alone any caffeine in the tea. I started sipping tiny amounts using the teaspoon, savouring every drop. I watched my Mom and her friend drink their tea, listened to their chatter, revelled in the ritual of it all.


Huh. Like most things, I guess I come by my milky, sweet tea honestly. 

Sonja likes to point out that I drink tea and Peter drinks coffee. "Is that your tea, Mommy?" "And Daddy drinks coffee?" Yes, Baby. I wonder which one, if any, Sonja and Haven will drink when they grow up. For the time being, Sonja only digs hot chocolate. Now she just needs to perfect drinking it at a reasonable speed so we can cut down on the amount of wardrobe changes needed in one afternoon. 

Thank goodness hot chocolate is a once-in-awhile treat. ...Although the photos are fantastic.