My Own Island

If I can't have my very own tropical isle, this is definitely the next best thing. Christmas morning I came down stairs to this:

M spearheaded this group gift and managed to almost completely surprise me. He even wrapped a decoy gift for under the tree. He stored the flat pack (IKEA, of course) in the neighbors garage. Then sometime on Christmas Eve my brother in law went and got it from them and put it in the side yard under the pretense of taking a cell phone call in the backyard. My dad almost spoiled it when he mentioned something about assembling something kitchen related. Fortunately, I am dense and I just thought he meant maybe we should go get the island I've been wanting from IKEA as something to all do together. But it did make me a little suspicious that maybe, just maybe, there was something going on that I didn't know about. Then bedtime rolled around and I figured I was wrong since I'd seen no sign of anything and M was headed to bed with me.

Turns out M laid there until I fell asleep, then got back up and snuck downstairs where he and my family all assembled my island for me. Aren't they awesome? In the few short weeks we've had it, I've reached the point where I can't figure out how we lived without it. It is the official dedicated food preparation surface. (This is important when you're bad about taking care of dirty dishes!) There was such a void in my life/my kitchen (practically the same thing, right?) and now it has been filled. I no longer have to trek over to the fridge, balance all my ingredients in my arms or set them on the floor because there's nowhere to set them down, then haul them all back to the counter (usually in several trips)! The island is right there, bridging the gap between food storage and cooking. Now I can declare that I like my house without reservation. This new found joy in a previously sub-par kitchen has inspired a lot of cooking. Brace yourselves for more info than you want about my culinary exploits...