The (new) heart of our home

Our new dining room table was delivered Friday.

I believe that the dining room table is the heart of the home.  It is where families come together at the end of each day to reconnect and recount the events of that day.  It is where immediate and extended families and old and new friends break bread to celebrate each other. 

I picture my new dining room table as it gets older being the place that my husband and I teach our children about family.  We will spend countless hours together at this table over the years, and Hoot and her future sibling(s) will remember the dining room table as the place they learned to write their names, the place where we all shared good news and bad, where they blew out the candles on their birthday cakes.  It will be where home work is done, where permission slips are signed, and where they grow and learn.  We will enjoy Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas morning cinnamon rolls here, as well as our everyday family dinners. 

I hate to think of Owl as a big girl, a teenager, a wife, a mother -  but you can't stop the wheels of time.   But I can take solice in the fact that she will always be able to return to our home and that every scratch and mark on this table will be a scar of love, recorded forever for us all to see and remember our best times together.