Eight Random Things about my Kitchen

This is going to meander, and I'm going to go slightly off-topic, but isn't that the point of a meme? I asked my husband about it. He said, "It's really the beating heart of the house, isn't it?" So here goes.

1. My kitchen is more than just the kitchen. It's also the dining room. People brag about an "eat-in" kitchen; here, it's that or the living room. One of our rules is No food in the bedrooms, and it's just common sense not to have food in the bathroom. Not to mention there aren't enough seats in there.

2. My kitchen is more than just the kitchen. It's also the schoolroom. SFO Mom has over 100 cookbooks in her kitchen; I don't have that many, but maybe a fifth of them are cookbooks. The rest are for school, or the Time/Life series on the American Revolution, or something else. We also have our school supplies and the stereo on one of the bookshelves. It's nice and centrally located.

3. It's also the laundry room. With no basement, where else would the washer and dryer go? I don't like to have the washer going during school or meals, but the dryer is okay. I like to think the steady hum on the other side of the wall from Rachel's crib helps lull her to sleep. I'm not convinced, but humor me.

4. It's also our science lab. Making crystals, planting beans, watching candles self-extinguish in sealed jars, snow melting to water.... Except for the time we used paper plates in the bathtub for plate tectonics. The Boy had a question about earthquakes.

5. I use my oven. That's not a big deal for most of you, but to me, it's huge.
See, my mother's oven went somewhere in my very early childhood. Actually, I'm not sure, but she mutters something about it being set to "clean" when she went to preheat, or some such, and has not tried it since. I have snapshot memories of the five of us around the kitchen table, my brother still in a high chair. So... Roasted turkey on Thanksgiving? At my aunt's. Christmas cookies? Store-bought. Homemade cakes for birthdays? Nope, Sara Lee or Pepperidge Farm. Banana muffins when they got overripe? Negative. Lasagna, casseroles, roast, meat loaf, brownies?
We never even had Shrinky-Dinks.
So when I make pumpkin pie from scratch (except for the crust), or bake muffins, or cookies, or Idiot Chicken Italian (frozen chicken breasts, spaghetti sauce, 45 min at 350), or anything at all, I get a pang. Of something I missed but am providing for my own.

6. The color scheme is a true collaboration of my husband's and mine. We decided to make it more neutral to sell. I looked online for some flooring I liked, he took the printout to the store and chose a different pattern (same colors, though). I went to the paint store and got half a dozen chips I liked; he came home, brought them all along with the sample of flooring outside, and chose his favorite.
Now the floor is nicer than the former in that it doesn't show when it's dirty. The flipside, though, is it doesn't show when it's clean, either.

7. All of the appliances, except the refrigerator, are about the same age. The stove we bought within a week of moving in, the washer shortly after, and the dryer by the following spring. All from Sears. This was even before Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

8. I think it might be my favorite room in the house. It's where so many of my memories are, so many things happen. I think he nailed it when he said about the beating heart of our home.

So there. I think that was pretty random, eh? And it didn't take me a week, either. I tag Shelly and Heather.