And the Jenga Tower Topples.........

My parents called yesterday from Italy, sitting at a cafe sipping cappacinno. They saved their pennies for a year, along with my mom's 2 best friends, and embarked on a 2 week tour of Italy. They deserve it.

My brother is 19 and living at home. My sister and I swore up and down to my mom that he would be fine alone. That we would stop by to check in and have him over for dinner and yada yada yada. I even crashed his party Thursday night. There are 10 or so people there, just hanging out. No big deal. I was pleasantly surprised that I didnt have to start throwing people out and be the "Mean Big Sister". In fact, I was down right proud. Maybe he was growing up and turning on a little responsibility. Friday night---same thing. Saturday night, same thing. Things were going fine over at my parents house.

Until yesterday..............

There is soda and beer stains on the brand new (1 week old) carpet in the basement. There are cigarette burns in the basement bathroom rug; not to mention the cigarette butts on the bathroom floor! Oh but thats not the worst. Those things are managable.

The beautiful Pottery Barn table and chairs in my mom's kitchen---the table and chairs she dreamed of and saved her money for----is ruined. Apparently there was no other flat surface in the house for my brother's friends to play Jenga on.

I am not kidding.

The table has 3 leaves; the outside two are rounded to make an oval table. The end leaves arent too bad but the middle leaf (the largest section) has at least a dozen dents from the Jenga blocks. Some are pretty shallow (still the color of the table but dented). Others are so deep that the color is different than the table surface.

Oh yeah....the table is discontinued at Pottery Barn and cannot be replaced.