the honeymoon might be over, but there is still time for us

We've been painting (in case your eyes have glazed over lately and you haven't noticed that I said that already a few billion times).  It's made me rethink a lot of what I have been envisioning for our home.

One of my favorite things about this dining room is its openness to the kitchen and living room.

Picture taken in November 2010

Our new color scheme really looks fantastic with the existing newish flooring, which has totally exceeded my personal testing ground of "neutral but not boring."

But it seems like the dining room was a little *too* spacious.  Our table when fully expanded will seat 8.  We only have 4 chairs.  Go ahead, do the math.  Now that Pinky is in the booster seat instead of the tot-lock seat that attaches to the table, either Mr Lemon or myself is left to stand and eat at the countertop.  Not a really great solution.

And also, we are the parents of three talkative children, and we don't get a lot of time to talk face to face as it is.

So I did this one night last week on a whim:

I only edited this photo for brightness,because there is no
good way to take a picture of the dining room at night
without the glowing orb in the center.

I closed up the table, and moved it several feet closer to the living room.  This did two things:
 * gave us easier access to turning on the upper or lower ceiling fan lights, as well as the fan
 * showed me exactly all of the square footage of flooring I was opening up to utter chaos of shoes and sand once the windows of heaven finally shut and the floods begin to recede.  I thought I saw a dove fly by the other day with an olive branch in his beak, but I can't be certain.

I moved the area rug from the living room to the big open space in the dining room. That just made sense - and then I had a flash of brilliance.

I moved the dinette set into the dining room, from the living room.  Now we have a space when we are all five home where Mr Lemon and I can sit together, face to face, and actually have a conversation.  Splenda is responsible for making sure the kids' table has napkins, barbeque sauce, drinks, rolls, whatever they all need.

For once my obsessive need to rearrange my furniture actually made my husband smile :)

I'm sure in a few years when we have all the potty training done, and the toddlers are more independent with their drinks, etc, that we will all five sit together again for meals. But at this point all of their constant needs are overriding our need as a couple to have communication about our day in person (as opposed to our normal texting and stolen conversations between his work time and my parenting time).

It's the little things that I need to do sometimes to put my marriage back at the top of the priority list where it belongs.  What have you done lately along those lines?