_starrgirl_, rasilio, rloveking, voltbang and their littluns came over for dinner. I am now fully convinced that I am far too old to have another baby. I had suspected as much, but gosh—toddlers and infants take even more energy than I had remembered. I’m worn out from just a few hours, and that was with their parents here and involved!
So we had good food (sambear is a wonderful cook) and good company. A little less conversation than we might have liked, but the littluns do have a way of keeping our attention on them, and it’s a school night for two of our kids so we had to chase folks away earlier than we would have preferred.
Oh—our kids cooperatively cleaned the kitchen. Without being asked. Without any bickering. I’m still in shock. It was a lovely thing.
This is the first time I can remember not seeing my mom on Mother’s Day except for one time in 1991. I did call her, of course, but I didn’t get to see her. It feels rather weird.
I like our house. Most of the time. But I’m looking forward to living in a house with a kitchen big enough for a much larger table than the one we have now. One of those great big farmhouse-size tables that seats ten would be just about enough most of the time. Yes, we only have five people living here, and our current table seats six, but we like to entertain, and sambear really loves feeding people. And six adults plus two kids who need high-chairs won’t fit in our kitchen comfortably.
We stayed at an acquaintance’s lake house a few years ago for most of a week—he had an indoor carp pond and had to have someone take care of it while he was out of the country (apparently carp are delicate and need lots of monitoring). The kids were on Christmas break so we bundled everybody up and took a mini-vacation. The house was weird, as far as I’m concerned, but I liked the kitchen.
The kitchen was great. It was really big with a huge island in the middle. There was an enormous table with plenty of room to move around even when lots of people were sitting around the table. It was all wood, exposed rafters, wood paneling, etc. I like wood. The rest of the house I would have designed totally differently, but the kitchen was almost perfect. That’s the kind of kitchen I want.
They did have a really large formal dining room in the house, too. There was a baby grand piano at one end of it and a huge table to seat twelve in it. We never even considered sitting at the table, but I did enjoy playing the piano.
There were also two lovely fireplaces in the house, in the den and living room. Unfortunately, the homeowner was a philistine and had put fancy silk flower arrangements in them and then glassed them in. He designed the house with the fireplaces, so why would he glass them over? It became something more of a nuisance when there was an ice storm and power outage and we realized that we couldn’t use the fireplaces to create heat. (Thankfully, the power came back on within about 12 hours.)
And there was really no reason to get into all that, except that thinking about a bigger kitchen triggered the memory.
