Now Let's Try to Quantify the Number of Calories to Be Consumed Herein

 Behold the magnificence that is the new VT kitchen table:



 

I don't know how to express how much we love this hunk of wood.  Our new table:  it's a huge picnic table, but doesn't it have a monastic look to it?  Don't you think the Last Supper happened at a table like this?  I like to think our table was repurposed from a remote Umbrian monastery; but it's just from Pottery Barn.   Now, please note the benches:  you can fit 349 kids on each side.

 

Our old table was, quite simply, a nightmare. 



 

 

Our old nightmare table, pictured here at Colette's 3rd birthday

We bought our table when we moved here, and I was so thrilled to be procuring a "grownup" table, since we were upgrading from PVT's bachelor furniture - basically a card table from Target.  So this table was heavy, ornate, and had a piece of glass that weighed 239 tons in the middle.  The chairs were heavier than hippos with blasphemous BMIs.

The problem with our ex-table?  Anytime someone spilled, or ate something crumby with sprinkles on top - yes, every meal - the liquid and crumbs would get caught between the glass and wood, so that someone (moi) would have to heft the glass to clean underneath it, lest a science experiment start to ferment.  So I would push the glass up with one arm and a hip, grunt, and clean the rim around the sides.  But if I were pregnant, or tired, or sad, the task simply would not get done.  Hence the colonies of mold, fungi, and gonorrhea residing in this awful piece of furniture. 

But on our recent trip to the motherland, we were inspired by our friends' dining room table - friends who are Margaux's godparents, incidentally.  Brian and Sara put us to shame:  they have had seven kids in the time we have had a lousy six - AND they home school.  In essence, Sara makes me feel like a huge slacker - but she is so dang warm, smart and genuine, I love her anyway, and try to emulate her as much as possible in my own pathetic way.  Like steal her idea for a kitchen table.

Hence our monastic Pottery Barn Table.  Come on over - there's always room for one more on the bench.