I took delivery of new end tables for our living room today, and it hit me that our taste in home furnishings has taken a sharp turn in the southwesterly direction.

When Fred and I got married, we thought the look we’d go for was “Early American.”  Rugged enough for him (our dining room chairs weigh as much as the boys do) yet not so masculine that it looks like no women live here.  Well, woman, anyway.  I’m it.

Think Amish farmhouse.  But with lighting in the top of the hutch – so “Amish plus electricity.”

Then we found a few oil paintings we loved in Guatemala on our pick up trip to adopt the twins.  So “Amish plus electricity plus crater lakes, Maya marketplaces, and 15th century Spanish architecture.”

Moving from that room (and yes, we left it just like that for now) …

About a year ago, Fred read some articles online about how glass tables are dangerous around kids because they can shatter, and there are so many deaths per year from shattered glass tables.  Etc, etc.  Well we had just such tables – left over from Fred’s bachelor days – in our living room.

To Craigslist they went (are we cruel for letting someone else buy them and take the risk?).  And ever since then, we’ve had a look in our living room that I like to call “Early Trailer Park:”

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Ah yes, for far longer than is usually accepted in middle-class America, we’ve been sporting TV trays at both ends of our (nod to my OWN Scottish heritage - plaid?  heck yeah!) sofa. 

But God bless Fred’s mom; she gave us MONEY for Christmas.  Hurray!  And so we finally bought ourselves some end tables.  End tables that match the armoire we bought a while back to house our office supplies and laptops.

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And as I was removing the “Hecho en Mexico” tags from the drawer pulls, it hit me:  our sons have actually shifted our decorating style!  If you can call what all I’ve mentioned above “style” (debateable, I know).

Somewhere in all the parenting, we’ve come to a place where even the things with which we surround ourselves in our home feel more “right” if they reflect our combined heritages.  And we didn’t even realize it was happening.  It’s just that we really like something a few clicks closer to a Central American style now than we did six years ago.

Not that there aren’t plenty of white people without Latino kids who prefer Southwestern decor.  But for us, it’s directly related. 

Huh.

That wasn’t something they mentioned in all our “things to consider before you adopt transracially” educational materials.