Kind of a big deal

We've lived in Germany for almost 16 months now. If you read this blog back when we were getting ready for our move, you'll recall the mountains of clothes, books, furniture and assorted other belongings that we got rid of in order to fit everything we owned into a large shipping container...alongside our little Audi. If you didn't read the blog back then I'll just let you know now...we got rid of a ton.

We have homeschooled for nearly ten years now and during that entire time, we have never had a dedicated homeschool table. It never made sense to do it any other way. We lived in normal sized homes without room for a dedicated work area for school other than our normal living area. We ate breakfast at our dining room table, then did school there before we had some lunch. Then we did a bit more school before we had dinner...all at the same table. When we moved here, we lucked out and got a dedicated homeschool space...but we still only had one table.

All of that has changed now. 

We've had our dining room table down in our school room and a very empty spot up in our dining room without a table at all. Until yesterday.

We picked out a table more than a month ago but it was out of stock. I got tired of waiting so when I saw this one and liked it and Steven said we should get it, I was overjoyed. This may not seem like a big deal to you, but 16 months without a dining room table is a lot. We've had to buy a lot of furniture since moving here. Furniture is expensive. It takes time to collect the things that you want. 

I like this table much better than the first one we picked out. It's square and bar height. (Right now it's pulled out to it's maximum size. There is a leaf in the middle that pops up and down so it can be made smaller than what it is.) We have six chairs but I think it will fit eight so it's nice and big. Scott's a big board game/card game fan so he's very excited about having a good place for the family to play together and I am so happy about having family meals again around a table. I love our couch but the poor thing has gotten worn down in the past year or so. We sleep on it, eat on it, play games on it. If furniture could sigh in relief, the couch would have probably done just that when we heaved this very heavy table up.

Maya doesn't understand all the excitement. "What's so important about a table?" she asked Scott and I at breakfast this morning. The two of us shook our heads. We agree, as does Steven. It's kind of a big deal.