Operation Table

I still hate tables. I still firmly believe they are crap magnets. I still don’t buy into the need for one to enhance quality of life / create a stable family / sit and do hama beads and french verbs at.

However, I do now seem to have one!

Over Christmas while the tree was in the lounge we moved out the kids’ table and chairs into the playroom to make room to move the sofas up to accomodate the tree. The chairs and tables are really old and despite me having little children are really getting too small for them to sit at these days. We’re also having friends over to return the fancy dinner party we went to in November (remember, the ones who weren’t swingers after all?) and were fretting about giving them laptrays that have been used for paint and glitter by the children.

So before Christmas we decided that when the tree went we’d bring a table and chairs into the lounge and get rid of the kids’ tables.

This doesn’t mean we’ll be doing workbooks.

So today was Taking Down The Decorations Day. I had a very long lie in and by the time I came downstairs the tree was already down and out of the house (Ady has put it round with the chickens so they could have a little post-Christmas celebration all of their own. It will eventually either be chopped up by Ady for firewood or taken off to the allotment by me to go in the compost bin 😆 ) and there was a frenzy of hoovering going on.

We got all the decorations down and Ady went to find the table and chairs in the garage. We did used to have a table – a nice wooden one with fake tile-top, green to match the colour the walls used to be. It was in the lounge for years and then in the kitchen at our Manchester house but when we moved back here we had the kids tables so they went in here instead. But during it’s languishing unloved and mourning the days when we used to have a table times in the garage the table has sustained water damage (or tear stains maybe – can a table cry?). One corner is really quite moldy and actually I decided that the green top of the table and the green backs of the chairs would make it look a lot like a table that belonged in a different coloured room. So after a quick browse online at both the state of the finances this month and what was available we reserved and then collected this set

We loaded the car up with various bits of rubbish from both the Grand Wardrobe Clear Out and the Unearthing The Table From The Garage escapades and went to Argos via the dump to get rid of that, and my parents house to deliver their wedding anniversary card (they weren’t in) and Sainsburys to get various food items and large quantities of reduced to clear chocolate (Quality Street because we’d somehow not had a tin for Christmas, boxes of liqueurs because they were so cheap and Terry’s Chocolate Oranges because you can’t get them at other times of year and the kids love them and they were knocked down to 61 pence each).

Once home I did table and chair errection – I remembered something else I do Michelle! I always do the flatpack furniture assembly 🙂 -and had a bath and cooked dinner. The kids’ DS’d – which seems to have been all they’ve done since Christmas really. However there is a plus side – Davies is teaching Scarlett to read and write! I overheard him telling her how to spell various words today and saying ‘let me see’ when she couldn’t read something and helping her spell it out! 😯 I’m determined not to limit their DSing although I am insisting on them putting them down to eat!

So we have a table. It looks really nice actually, we can fit six round it and I have instigated a LAW that anything left on it at the end of each evening will go in the bin so as to ensure it does not become a crap magnet. It feels like a move towards bigger older children :).

I faithfully promise not to hang a world map above it and I hearby solomnly swear I will NOT make 2009 the year I introduced normals!