Bright and early this morning my husband loaded up three horses, two cats and two dogs to bring to town to the vet for minor procedures and shots.
This morning we were also getting ready for picture day at school. At any point in the one- hour span it takes us to get out the door, I was running a coffeeshop, pancake house, therapist office and hair salon out of my kitchen. On the table sat a kennel full of two cats who hate each other, growling loudly to make sure everyone knew about it while my husband searched the premise for a leash for dogs that only go to town for vet appointments (and one goat show last year, but that was an accident.)
I did not volunteer to go with my husband for the vet drop off. I had my own drop off to do with a 10-year-old and an 8-year-old trying to keep their hair in place and practicing their smiles while singing along to their curated iTunes playlist coming through the speakers of the SUV. In addition to barista, line cook, therapist and stylist, I am also the lowest paid chauffer in the land.
On Sunday I turned my kitchen into an art studio and invited the cousins over to paint jeans in our school colors to get ready for homecoming week. Picture a giant kitchen table covered in clothes and paint and sparkles and four girls at varying levels of interest and perfectionism—two of them happily painting, drawing and adding gems to the pockets of their jeans without a care about the outcome looking like Martha Stewart’s Pinterest board, and two of them on the other side of the table and spectrum of perfectionism who cared very much that their garments looked like Martha’s. To give you a clear picture: at one point one of the girls (who shall not be named for fear of retaliation) was laying on the ground saying, “we’re doomed!” because the outline of her wolf paw print was too thick. This was the third time she had taken to the floor over the placement of paint, and it wouldn’t be her last.
This is where my little sister’s master’s level education in school counseling comes in handy in our life. I am not a real therapist, after all, and so I went to my room and screamed into a pillow for ten seconds while she gave a lesson on perfectionism and trying to enjoy the process and, also, how to be nicer to your mom. I looked at my little sister and remembered when we used to gather our daughters together around this table for construction paper handprint turkeys and dream of their bright future. Never in this dream did I anticipate an art project to doom us all…
Anyway, all of the girls eventually completed their jeans to a level they were proud of, (although Rosie would have liked to add a couple hundred more gems) and then it was time to clear that kitchen table for a frozen pizza supper because that’s all I could mentally handle after hours in the crafting trenches.
This kitchen table is first generation. My husband and I bought it after our oldest daughter was born. Up until that point we had been eating and crafting and playing cards and grooming animals on second-hand tables that held memories and stories of their own. We had ours built by Amish furniture makers with big family suppers in mind, and so it pulls out with four extra leaves and can comfortably seat fourteen people or so. When my husband walks by to see another craft explosion, he likes to mention that he never thought all these tiny paint brushes would be a part of his life. In my world, any surface is a crafting surface. In his world, any surface is a place to set a tool, so he should understand. This table has also been a work bench plenty of times.
A couple weeks ago I was minding my own business at that kitchen table, making a cute “cake” out of diapers for a friend’s baby shower while my daughters and nieces milled around the kitchen creating things of their own. We had a batch of kittens several weeks prior and one poor little one had developed a growth on his neck that my husband diagnosed as a bot fly (or warble fly) larva. In case you can’t imagine, this is gross. Botfly larva create a slow-growing, raised, boil-like bump on the carrier that can be extracted by using Vaseline to suffocate the larva so it comes up for air and you can pull it out with a tweezer. Ugh. Naturally, I imagined we would deal with this situation in the barn or the great outdoors. But no. Right in the middle of my diaper cake crafting time, on the other side of that kitchen table sat my husband in his reading glasses, holding a tiny kitten in the palm of his rubber-gloved hand about to confidently perform a veterinary procedure while one girl gagged and two girls observed in fascination, narrating the entire endeavor for me because I couldn’t watch.
Because my protests were waved off, I at least grabbed a couple towels to protect the surface and scootched my craft out of the way until the kitten was saved. Which he was in no time.
Martha Stewart would never.
But we did. And then I thoroughly sanitized, because our kitchen table might be a temporary vet office, but it’s also our crafting table, and our hair salon, and our therapist office, and our card table and our crafting table and, for gawd sake, and our pancake house!
