Hi! Welcome to my new blog! I’m going to be writing about food, cooking, family and home – and if you read my other blog, you’ll know that those are my four main passions. If this is your first time reading me, I’m going to awkwardly introduce myself: I’m the happily married mother of three kids – The Girl (who is 8), The Boy (who is 5) and The Baby (who is an ornery two).
We bought our house for many reasons, most of which consisted of me having just had my second child and my ovaries threatening to explode if we didn’t own a house. It’s a sprawling, slightly post-Victorian house that even under dozens of layers of really ill-conceived wallpaper and bad 1970s renovations had tons of potential – tall windows and high ceilings, antique hardwood floors, and a beautiful big lot. What it markedly did not have was a good kitchen. It’s small, it’s cramped and claustrophobic, and there isn’t enough cupboard space in the poorly-made cupboards – but the rest of the house was such a steal that we bought the house anyway. We told ourselves that we would renovate the kitchen right away.
We are SUCH liars.
Five year later, we’ve made a lot of progress with the rest of our renovations – the decades of loathsome wallpaper are gone, for one – but the kitchen is still exactly the same. I can picture my ideal kitchen in my head – a pristine, magazine-perfect kitchen, some sterile white room. I don’t know where the wall of children’s drawings would go, our dozens of battered cookbooks, my collection of unbelievably kitschy kitchen art and teapots – they wouldn’t fit, likely, into my imagined perfect kitchen, my perfect life. And of course, the perfect me in my imagined kitchen wouldn’t look much like the real me, either – slimmer, more stylish, put together, this pristine person for a pristine room. Not much of my real life would make it in my dream kitchen.
So maybe it’s just as well that we’re making do with our outdated kitchen right now, because I LIKE my real life. The perfect kitchen will likely come some day – when time has changed me in ways that I can’t even imagine, and for now this is the kitchen of my children’s childhoods. It still is a dumpy, outdated tiny little room but it is also the room where they come running in after school, excited for hot chocolate chip cookies cooling on the table, this spot that means – more than any other room – home for us.