A Home Tour: the Dining Room

In celebration of our six-month milestone, I thought it would be fun to start blogging through a home tour.  I have a few reasons:

• When you come to visit, you'll already have a bit of the lay-of-the-land down and we can get right to enjoying each other. 
• I have opinion questions to ask but no one in the house who really cares, so you all can be my sounding boards.
• I need external pressure to make progress. Eventually the tour will move to the upstairs, and so perhaps I ought to spend some time finding my child a dresser and looking into curtains for three bedrooms.  

I thought we would start with one of the most-finished areas in our home, which is also a room I am certain you will spend time in when you visit.  (You are catching that I am using when, not if, you visit, right?)

This is the view from the living room.  We can add leaves to our table to grow it right through the archway for more seating, which makes me so happy.

We have said before that our "style" is comprised of straight lines, a lack of decorative "clutter" (because living as a family of six brings enough clutter), and items that are meaningful - like my paternal grandmother's dining set, plants that remind me of my maternal grandmother, the cutest flamingos that Julian made at preschool, our family sign.

The chairs from our apartment table days could use some paint touch-ups, but let's just romanticize about how every scratch and chip are connected to the memory of raising a family.  That should buy me some time.

This corner is the most unfinished and yet one of my favorite spots in the house.  I need a frame for the canvas, and I hope to do more of a collage wall here.  Right now, I have framed original first music compositions from Eli and Toby, and I would like to include some piano recital pictures.  When I dream big, I imagine replacing the painting with this Lindsey Letters canvas.  Perhaps a woven piece to hang over the phone jack?  I am open to suggestions, my friends.

I have a plant on my kitchen windowsill that I am hopefully nursing back to health to take its place on top of the hutch.  I am becoming a crazy plant lady, and I love it.

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Weekend meal plans to enjoy around this table, for what could be our last wintry days of the season:

Cheeseburger Soup (Julian's will just be hamburger soup) and corn chips
Crispy Balsamic Chicken and Brussel Sprouts
Minestrone Soup (no Parmesan until serving in individual bowls) and bread