Mother’s Day

_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.