West Elm, Design Within Reach & All Things Dreamy

This is NYCity Mama’s dining room area,

in her dreams, where she lives without kids, specifically boys, specifically toddlers.  This is where she can have nice, designer chairs, with cream cushions, and a nice wooden table, without fear that they will be covered in scratches, stains, bumps, or rips.  This dining room table is a little over $1,000 from West Elm, and NYCity Mama would save up for it and buy it, if she knew that it wouldn’t be completely destroyed by the Tazmanian Devils she calls her sons.

Instead, this is Mama’s dining room table:

It costs $130 and she got it from a local furniture store, the kind that sells those really gaudy headboards with gargoyles and flowers and pillars from the Roman era, you know, those.  This was the most conservative, simplest piece they had. It’s too small for her family of five, and recently she began covering the cream color chair cushions (because she couldn’t find any of another color) with beach towels till she can find cushions to cover them, because she is tired of scrubbing off the pizza sauce, bean sauce, meat sauce…or that curious looking, weird color thing that showed up, every time the kids finished eating.

Because, though the distance from the plate to the mouth seems quite short and direct, it is, it seems, not that easy resulting in this mess every single time, after every single meal…no matter what.

As you can see, they had pasta tonight. So, Mama has a dream book…and in it one can find all sorts of pretty things.  Like the cocktail dress she will purchase from Neiman Marcus which will replace the easily dirtied, not very expensive, nor really all that attractive crap she often runs around in (and will fit a much smaller version of her current self), or the crystal vase she will buy at Tiffany’s which she will proudly display on her new dining room table, with the cream cushions, and designer chairs, next to the expensive and attractive sectional she will purchase from Design Within Reach.

Yes, these are all just “things” and yes, the signs of children in a home makes the heart warm, happy, and all fuzzy inside…but sometimes, so do pretty things.  

In the meantime, she will continue to cover the chairs and lay a tablecloth over their cheap table before they eat, something that makes her husband laugh every time because he cannot understand why she would care about their cheap, crappy table.  But she feels it’s nice to feel “human”, and it’s nice to not always feel like they have lost all sense of style and chic-ness.  And though she may have to settle for her lumpy, used-to-be-only-one-color-couch till the kids start showing their human side, she knows that one day, in time, her dreams will come true.

 

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Tags: Design Within Reach, Neiman Marcus, Tiffany's, West Elm
Posted in Adventures | 5 Comments »