Table Manners without the Table

This is Part 3 in a series about our small living space. Here is Part 1 and Part 2.

It was one of those moments where any mother would have beamed with pride. We had company over. Not our usual if-you-want-some-water-you-know-where-the-cups-are kind of company, but the kind of company where we actually found our dining table and brought out a wrinkled tablecloth to cover the goop which cannot be removed with mere soap and water.

We were doing this company thing for reals. Except we forgot the small detail of sufficient seating. But our guests were graciously making do, and one had found a decent seat on the bottom step of the stairs leading to CutieLittleBoy's bunk bed.

Let me sidetrack for a moment. SmilesBabyGirl does an amazing wedge impersonation. For being as robustly chub as she is, she has a unique talent of inserting herself in small spaces and then pushing outward until she is pleasantly comfortable.

So our unwarned guest was making as much of a chair as she could out of the bottom step when the Wedge made her way in-between the guest and her bowl of ice cream.

So maybe the beaming I was doing was not on account of pride. "I'm sorry," I said. "We're trying to teach our children not to beg for food." (Although, truthfully, there wasn't a whole lot of begging going on. She knew her rightful place, the rest of us were just slow on the recognition.)

Another guest innocently asked, "At what age does that become not okay?"

Good question.

I've spent a fair bit of time in the last six months thinking about family dinners, table manners, and raising model citizens. The question all comes down to this: Do you need a dining table to achieve the social-glue known as the family dinner?

A baby and four bookshelves ago, we similarly thought we had no room for eating around the table. Meals were eaten either on the couch or sitting on the floor next to the booster seat which must have had a fear of heights for all of the time it spent strapped to a chair.

Oh, and chairs! For awhile we didn't even have chairs. No room, you know.

But the time came where teaching our toddler a handful of table manners was undeniably more important than keeping every book we owned accessible. Heresy? Dear book-loving friends, do not be quick to judge.

Before babies we had books. And places to sit down. That blank wall in the picture is our front door.

More books and more places to sit down. It looks like I have lots of flowers, but really I just have an enormous mirror. From left to right: inside storage, a desk, a dining table with 4 chairs, our largest bookshelf, and extra seating.

And then another season came and went and with it a big-boy bed and even fewer bookshelves… and the table got ousted once again.

Same mirror. Big-boy bed from top to bottom: bed, bookshelf and standing computer desk, auxiliary kitchen storage, desk, our largest bookshelf (now more board books than ever before). This wunderbed is flanked by our "hall closet" (see the vacuum), and additional shelving. In the foreground is the aforementioned booster seat. It has exchanged its fear of heights for a nomadic lifestyle.

Priorities, dear friends. Even Maslow knew sleep is more important than the safety of eating with well-mannered children.

But as for our guests? Let's just hope they've reached self-actualization and can approach their invitation to dinner with creativity and lack of prejudice.

"Bye!" We call after them. "Thank you for coming! I mean, really, thank you for having dinner with us!"