January 14, 2009
You’ll eat off the floor and LIKE it.
June Cleaver’s kitchen certainly had the proverbial floor that was clean enough to eat off of. Mine is nowhere close. I mean, I sweep it daily, Swiffer it every day (or every other) and give it a more thorough mopping…when the mood strikes. The five second rule applies in my home with no fatalities to date.
And it’s a darned good thing too, because it looks like we’re going to be sitting on the floor to eat pretty soon, whether we like it or not. Maybe I can redo the kitchen in a Japanese theme. There’s some awfully cute sushi stuff on etsy. Hmm.
No, I don’t detest our kitchen table – per se. It’s not old and hideous – we’ve only had it for two years, and I rather like it, in spite of the decorative groove that runs along each side and looked really cool in the furniture store. (I’ve since discovered that it catches every stinking crumb that falls on the table, and has to be scrubbed out regularly with a toothbrush.) The problem is, since I updated last, we have a new little walker in our house. She’s about two-foot-five and has a penchant for barreling slam into the sharp corners of the table at least twice a day.
It’s funny how most humans seem to have some embedded protect-the-head gene, but my little Boogie does not. In fact, we’re already down one table because of her – as soon as she started pulling up on the furniture, the living room coffee table had to go. She would knock her little noggin into the bottom of it every. single. time. The coffee table being expendable (one less thing to pile junk mail on), we moved it out to the shop for the foreseeable future. Hey, we even have more room to Wii Fit in there now.
But we’d have a much harder time adapting to life without our kitchen table. We eat three meals a day on the thing, most days. It’s where we sit to chat, to play games, to do art projects. It’s the center of our school day, being that it’s the only place Princess can spread out her papers and books and crayons without fear of her little sister snatching something and toddling away with it, happily crumpling or gnawing on it as she goes. Yeah, we would definitely miss it.
I don’t really see an alternative, though. I mean, we can’t keep letting the kid smack her head into the corner every time she walks by. I guess I could quit averting my eyes from her even for a second, all day long, in order to track her every move. I could stand sentry at the entrance to the kitchen all day, ready to pounce the second that the table enters her line of sight. Maybe I could find her a little padded baby helmet. But none of those things sound terribly feasible either. After all, dishes do need to be washed and potty breaks taken every once in a while, and neither of those chores are particularly easy with a chunky thirteen-month-old clinging to your hip.
I’m trying to look at the bright side: eating on the floor would make it a picnic every day. No one cooks for a picnic. And I hate cooking! This could be a winner after all.
June Cleaver Would Be Shocked 