There Will Be No Accompanying Photo With This Story

Tonight our guests very graciously complimented our dining room chairs and Rob and I were talking about all the other dining sets that we'd had before this one. We'd had the table that Rob inherited from his grandparents from an old folks' home in Florida, which he wrote his thesis on and would periodically write notes on when he happened to run out of paper (you'd have to ask if he'd gotten everything down somewhere else before you could wipe the surface). Later that table became Maddie's changing table which would have been dangerous had it not been shoehorned in between all the rest of our furniture.
Then there was the D.I. trestle table which seemed like such a step up. At one point, we had two arm chairs my parents had given us as projects, with cane seats and backs. One of them had a rip in the caning on the back. At dinner one night, Maddie was sitting in it, wiggling around in her seat, when suddenly she worked herself into the rip. It tore loudly, she lost her balance, looked very surprised, and fell right through onto the floor behind.
I thought it was the funniest thing to happen at the dinner table in a long time, and started to laugh uncontrollably. Maddie, meanwhile, had gotten the wind knocked out of her, but when she caught her breath, she began to squeal, not only because she hurt and was afraid, but also because her mother was laughing at her. I got down on the floor to help her up, and rub her back, still cackling about it, but she would not calm down. She, still screaming at the top of her lungs, threw up all over me.
This is only one of the many reasons that I'm glad to have a dining room set.