Why, you may ask, is our dining room neglected so? We have a lovely table and chairs, we have a cabinet full of "chinina" dishes, we have a beautiful sideboard full of silverware and serving dishes. What is stopping us from joining the civilized masses who enjoy their dinner in a dining room?
WELL, let me tell you.
1. We don't "dine" at all. We eat. The word "dine" conjures images of persons politely taking small bites of food in between polite conversation. The word "dine" suggests that there are multiple utensils on the table and that there are napkins actually being used. No, we do not dine. We eat. And when we eat, it does not reflect the first definition of the word in the dictionary: "eat- verb, to take in through the mouth as food: ingest chew and swallow in turn" but I suggest that when my family eats it looks more like the second defintion: "eat- verb, to destroy consume or waste by or as if by eating". What we need is an "eating room". A room in which it is acceptable to stuff huge quantities of food in one's mouth and then attempt to talk. A room in which potty talk is a preferred topic of conversation. A room where utensils may lie forgotten on the table while everything is eaten with hands- this includes soup, ranch dressing, grape jelly and salsa. A room where pants and sleeves are used in lieu of napkins. A room where food may be ingested, chewed, and then taken out of one's mouth to see just what partially-masticated food looks like. A room where some items may be ingested and swallowed without being chewed at all. Come to think of it, I know someone who had a room like this where her twin toddlers ate most meals- it was called the bathtub. It was certainly NOT the dining room.
2. The table in the dining room is never available for eating at because there is always laundry. It never ends. Never. And it is never all folded and put away at any given minute on any given day. There is SOMETHING folded and waiting to be put away on that table. And no, I can't just put my folded laundry somewhere else! Don't you know we have a very grabby baby around here?!? That table is the one place, aside from kitchen surfaces that his grabby little hands can't reach up pull down all those lovely folded shirts and pants. Forget about it.
3. My boys are not patient enough to eat in an area that is a whopping ten feet away from the food preparation area. If I had to stand up and walk ten feet to the kitchen and then back every time someone needed more food I would never get to take a bite from my own plate. Between the five of them, someone needs a napkin, a drink, a utensil, a second helping, a third helping, condiments, etc. every 30-60 seconds. What was that? Put the food on the table!? Are you crazy? Clearly you have not taken into account that putting food on the table inevitably leads to disaster. Food sitting on the table as opposed to food that stays on the stove-top or counter is 100% more likely to have milk spilled on it, to be knocked onto the floor, to be sneezed on, to have generous amounts of salt added to it or to be thoroughly squashed when the baby wiggles out of his highchair straps, stands on his tray and belly flops dramatically onto our dinner. True story.
4. The last and greatest reason we cannot use our dining room for dining is evident in the above photo. Look closely at the floor. What do you see? Hardwood floors? Tile perhaps? No. No, of course not. You see carpet. CARPET, people! Who's idea was that? Why in all of creation would you ever put carpet in a dining room? Have you seen the floor at our house after a meal? I am pretty sure my boys supported an entire civilization of ants and a family of mice with their leavings at our house in Cleveland. There are probably enough calories on our floor to support several dogs. Anyway, seriously, who started the trend to carpet dining rooms? Was it women trying to one-up each other? (My children eat so neatly that the ants in our house had to start a soup kitchen. Oh, yeah? My children eat so neatly that we have carpet in our dining room! *Gasp. No! Oh, yes sister. You better believe it.) Our house was built in 1956, so I did a little interior design research. Carpet was IN in a big way in 1956. Post war Americans were all about having all of the comforts of life they did without during the war and that included carpet. I get it. What's more comfortable than eating comfort food on a padded chair while your feet rest on some plush carpet? Who wouldn't want to wriggle their toes into carpet that is housing an impressive collection of bacteria, molds and fungi from all of the crumbs that lodged themselves in the fibers? How luxurious! Let's not forget about how beautiful it looks. Each new stain is a reminder of a meal shared with family and friends. "See that irregular yellow blob? That was from the time we had bratwurst and Uncle Bob squeezed the mustard too hard. Ooh, look! There's the chocolate ice cream splotch from Jane's birthday." The more I think about it, dining room carpets are a veritable goldmine of anthropological data! They could tell us so much about the dietary habits of their owners. Perhaps we are doing future historians a disservice by not eating over our dining room carpet. All of that data is being swept into the trash after every meal when it could be preserved for posterity in the depths of the carpet pads and fibers!
I will think on this. Perhaps our dining room should become our eating room after all. I have hope that someday we will dine together in the finer sense of the word. I dream of a day when the lessons we are trying to hard to teach about manners finally sink in. Until then, we will enjoy the room as it is- the laundry/play/sewing/project room that happens to be next to the kitchen.
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