Change #1

Unless we win the lottery and build a huge addition on the back of our house, the only way our kitchen is going to get more counterspace is if we say adios to the kitchen eating area. As loudly as the "temporary house" part of my brain is screaming "Aaaghhh! No eat-in kitchen means no resale value!" I am trying to be strong and beat it into submission. I can either have a crappy kitchen in which I eat sullenly for the next decade, or a nicer, roomy kitchen that forces me to actually use the expensive dining room furniture I made Jason buy a dozen years ago.**

Well, it's going to be a while before we actually start working on the kitchen renovation, but I'm eager to get moving in any way I can. So in order to test out the wisdom of eating in a carpeted dining room on a nice table with a two-year-old who is learning to use a regular cup and still regularly throws handfuls of food at the cat, we decided to eat all of our family meals in the dining room - a sort of practice for when we no longer have a kitchen table. We started last weekend.

I've got to say, I'm loving it. We decided it was a good time to start teaching Liza some table manners, since we hadn't used the table enough in the past to set up any "but I always ..." routines in her little brain. So we made a big deal about eating at the table, and how we always put a napkin in our laps, and we ask to be excused before we leave the table. And despite the fact that she's never been willing to do either before, she does it every time now, without having to be asked. And how cute is it when a two-year-old manages to get out some garbled version of "May I be excused from the table?" and holds up her hands to be wiped off? Soooo cute.

And the atmosphere at the table is just different - I don't know how to explain it. It's like at the kitchen table, you're crammed into the corner, and I'm so close to the stove that I can literally serve people food from the pans without leaving my seat, and there's this sort of "hunch over and get the eating over with" feeling that I never noticed until we ate in the dining room. Even with the cheery paint and kickin' curtains, it feels like a messhall. In the dining room, however, I sit at the table and feel calm. Food may still be cooking, and the corn may suck because I got it at the grocery instead of the farm, and my daughter may still not eat what I give her, but it doesn't seem as bad.

We have conversations, actual conversations in which Jason and I are allowed to finish sentences that aren't directed at Liza. And Liza is polite (mostly) and uses her fork (sorta) and doesn't complain when I give her an adult cup instead of a sippy cup. Okay, there's a little anxiety when the cup turns over, but I don't have much invested in the upholstery fabric on the chairs, and we're going to replace the carpet with hardwood when we redo the kitchen, so it's no big deal if something spills. Hell, she pees all over the floor in the rest of the house, so why should a little juice on the dining room floor freak me out?

The dining room experiment is going so well that we're just about ready to move on to stage 2: removing the kitchen table. The theory is that we'll be better able to visualize the changes we're thinking about if the 4' square thing isn't blocking our view. Of course, the kitchen will probably become slightly less functional when the table is gone, since it means all the craft/art stuff that Liza currently does there will have to move elsewhere. But other than as a stage for Play-Doh and paint-with-water, the kitchen table doesn't really do much for us. Heck, if the tablecloth I made wasn't so cute, that table probably would have hit the yard sale we had this weekend.

And if stage 2 works for us, Jason has decided that we might actually keep the table and use it in the basement for a gaming table. Especially if we can manage stage 3, removing the uncomfortable benches from the walls intact so they could be reused downstairs. Since I'm not the one who's going to be sitting on the benches pushing little plastic guys around on a grid and rolling dice, that's fine with me. The old kitchen table and chairs we've had for the past decade have a higher resale value than the homemade square one, anyway :) It does make me a little sad that we're going to try to remove the benches without the benefit of the sledgehammer ... I have so few excuses to use it, it seems a waste to pass one by without swinging it a few times. Oh, well - if we keep going on the demolition ourselves, I'll need to buy a Sawzall, which should more than make up for the lack of sledginess.




**Interesting historical fact: Before we had kids, and before we had cats, Jason and I were so boring that we actually took photos of our new furniture and sent them to our parents. Which is how I know for a fact that the Amish-built china cabinet was purchased before we were married in 1996, because I have a photo of it pasted in my album from our first apartment. When I convince my camera to work so I can scan it in, maybe I'll post a copy! Won't that be riveting?