What else does YOUR dining table do?

I have an aunt who has a house that is always in pristine, magazine-ready condition. It actually was in a magazine once. She raised a child and kept a house that way. You can ask the child how she felt about that. So in this blog, when I am often apologizing for the condition of my house in photos, she responds to me that the pictures of my house make her realize that she has no idea how real people live.

This inspires me to break it down using a scene from today. The boys come in a little before 4:00 pm. They walk themselves from where the bus drops them off at the stop sign, which is one house away from mine. I can hear the bus stop, so I know when they should be walking in the door. I'm usually upstairs in my office, so they come in, get a snack and a drink and wait for me to come down. I do and we get out all the folders and books and assignment pads and start organizing for their homework session, which has to be completed plus a parent-required reading period before any electronic devices can be turned on. This is a scene from about 4:30 pm today.

As you can see, my dining room is not just our dining room. It is also the Instructional Zone.

1.  Usually I park in the carport and come in the back door, so my purse is typically NOT on the dining room table. It prefers to be on the table in the sunroom. Today my car was parked in front of the house, so here rests my purse. You cannot see that my purse is sitting on top of three days of mail and catalogs. This is riveting information that now has you on the edge of your seat waiting for #2. You're welcome.

2.  Here sits my oldest boy, doing a little English workbooking. You may notice that his hair is significantly shorter than all the conversations you and I have had about his long, luxurious crown of hair and pictures we've exchanged since this summer. We had to get a little corrective haircut for him. He twists the front of his hair so much that he is giving himself a bald spot. I do not know how to get him to quit. He has to do that himself. Either he will force himself to stop for fear of being embarrassed to death when I send him to school with no hair in the front of his head. Or he's going to pull all the hair from the front of his head and will not have anything to twist anymore.

3. This is the oldest boy's assignment pad. You cannot tell from the photo, but Jake has the worst handwriting I've ever seen. I decide to pick my battles and leave that problem to his teachers.

4. This is Landen's assignment pad. He has beautiful handwriting, but he is slow as frigging molasses when he has to write in cursive.

5. Landen is going on his second field trip of the year and this is the permission slip we have to sign when we send $7 to the school for him to go. Jake has had no field trips. Poor middle schoolers. I also take calls and answer emails on my Blackberry while the boys do their homework. We do the things they may need my help with first (math) and then I go back up to my office and leave them to copy definitions or write their spelling words three times by themselves. I'm reinforcing the school's attempts to teach third graders and fifth graders some independence.

6.  This is my youngest child, who never misses an opportunity to be a ham and a half. He's supposed to be doing his math homework - subtracting money with three or more digits and decimals - not trying to commandeer a static picture I am trying to take. Landen always comes home with food on his white shirt. In this picture he has chocolate on the corners of his mouth from the ice cream sandwich he ate when he got home. Last night we got in a fight because he could not grasp the concept of not getting seconds of macaroni and cheese.

7.  There are real apples in a bowl on the table, not the faux fruit that is usually there. We are also rocking a tablecloth and my fancy seagrass chargers. Why not the plastic polka-dotted placemats we usually have? Because we had grown up friends over for dinner Saturday night, and we set the table for grown people. It just takes us a long time to unset it. We do this incrementally over a number of days.

8.  This is Jake's old people medicine holder because it's the only way his parents can remember when they check whether they gave him his medicine in the morning, a mere five minutes after he swallows it.

9.  Those two shoeboxes contain the new church shoes their mawmaw bought them this weekend, because they have grown out of their old church shoes. She dropped them off on Sunday. On Tuesday, they are still sitting on my table.

10.  In the distance is a bottle of pet stain remover sitting on my antique side table. Murphy sharted on my white chair the other night and I JUST washed the slipcover, so I was trying to remove the sight and smell with some industrial strength cleaner, which is a no-go. The only way to get shart off a white slipcover is to wash it.

11. YOU may keep ice in the ice bucket on your rolling bar cart. Or at least leave it empty and clean so you can put ice in it on a moment's notice. Not I. My kids have AMAZING bedhead in the morning. We spray their hair with water and detangler and spray gel to make them presentable for school while they eat their breakfast and drink their coffee milk at the table. Then we store it in the handy place in the dining room, because that's where children's hair products are supposed to go.

Miraculously the mess gets cleared enough for the four of us to take our meals here. I inspire my dining table to multitask as efficiently as I do (I cook and work at the same time) and I'm pretty proud of that. And don't worry about there not being room for that distant-future third Allbritton boy child to do their homework and take their meals. The table extends.