The Dining Room (AKA The Classroom)

Welcome to our Dining Room!  Join us for a meal.  We have no eat-in kitchen, so this is where we take our meals.  We spend a lot more time here than the average family, because this is also our homeschool classroom.  At least a couple of hours every day we read and discover, listen, learn, practice and share here.

We lived in this house for 2 months before I got around to buying a dining room table.  It was beautiful weather and we were eating out on our covered patio anyway.  Practical, too, when you have a toddler insisting she can handle her own spoon.

But probably a bigger reason it took so long to buy the table is because I could not find a table that was not made of glass, or at least partially glass.  We had a brief experience with a glass table at our short term residence, and it was not a good one.  Picture the fingerprints. I couldn't find any chairs without upholstery either.  I preferred bare wood (see: practicality of eating outside, above).  I finally special ordered this table and conceded on the chairs, ordering the darkest color fabric available.  We laugh because, again, we used our furniture allowance for this table & chairs.  At home we still use the table and chairs I took out of my parents basement when I got my first job.  It's the table I ate on as a child.  Maybe when we go home DaddyHealy will give me a furniture allowance. te-he.

The giant china hutch in the dining room was a piece I didn't want, but have learned to love.  The owner left it in the house because it's too big and heavy to move to the apartment they are living in while we rent this house.  It is a beautiful solid piece of furniture.  But it was her grandmother's armoire.  Antique family heirlooms and small children are not an especially good combination.   

Our contract for this assignment allowed us to ship a very limited amount of household items, and consequently, we have no "china" which, at this point in our lives, we are not using anyway.  DaddyHealy smartly suggested I use the hutch for homeschool supplies.  What an awesome use!  It is full, organized, and convenient.  Books, pencils, art supplies and notebooks. Glue sticks, stickers, scissors and paper.  Magnets, math manipulatives, a scale and lots of chalk.  I bet there are plenty of teachers out there wishing they could have this kind of storage in their classrooms.  A lucky teacher, a lucky woman.