Coffee. It’s a must in the morning, and this morning, I botched it good. Forgot to put the pot far enough into the coffee maker so that before I realized it, most of the coffee was spilling all over the countertop and what made it into the pot was so dark it looked like sludge.
As I was cleaning it up, I realized how different our coffee-drinking habits are at my house than they were when my wife and I first married.
It’s not so much that our drinking habits have changed, it’s just that there’s more people in my house drinking coffee.
I still need two cups every morning to feel like I can accept the fact that the new day has begun, especially when we always seem to have a little one who keeps us up at night. And my wife still makes hers with milk and sugar, lets it sit awhile to cool then sips it throughout the morning. Those two things have been a steady constant throughout our 20-year marriage.
But where four cups used to be enough, now we’re making 10 to 12 every day. A growing family means a lot of things, including how many beans to grind in the morning.
My wife and I talk a lot about what it means to raise a “straddle family.” We discuss homeschool curriculum, appropriateness of new movies, how to balance budgets when seven of your nine children need new shoes.
But it’s often the little things that change without much notice. Today, I noticed.
The 12-ounce bag of Peet’s coffee has made way for the 3-pound Costco bag. The two cups in the dishwasher are now more often six. Joining my wife and I for a cup in the morning can be as many as four other children, including our 8-year-old son who has been nipping coffee off of us since he was three. (Don’t worry, he gets less than a third of a cup, and it’s still an occasional experience, not every day.)
If I don’t get that second cup early enough, I just might not get it at all.
And I know I don’t always show it, coming downstairs a bit more grumpy than I should, but it’s a blessing to wake up each morning and have our house feel almost to the point of chaos as we maneuver around one another, reaching for milk, sugar, cups and saucers (OK, we don’t really use saucers, but we have them…) to get our day started.
Because this will pass. And the little inconvenience it might appear to be, someday in the future — probably closer than I realize — the 3-pound Costco bag of beans will be too much as these same children grow up, leave the house and lead their own lives.
And it will be just my wife and me sipping our coffee, reminiscing about the days when it was tough to get so much as a cup in our house each morning.
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