What goes on in your kitchen, stays in your kitchen

There are a lot of ways to redecorate your house; it might be especially timely with the holiday season coming up and visitors within reach. You can hire a competent builder and put an addition on your home, or you can hire a talented decorator and change the look of a few rooms.

But as we all know, the easiest way to redecorate your home is to plan a visit from a grandchild, around the 2- or 3-year-old range. Anything over 5 years will be too civilized. By then they are at such a high-tech computer level they refer to you as Grand Mom Droid, and their eyes never see the light of day.

Forget the idea of clean white lines and soft peach pastels. Throw away the matching window treatments in cream colors. All that’s out. The new motif will be called “Le Ground,” as in food and stains ground into any surface, including an opening in the wall that the termites missed. Cocoa Puffs, Froot Loops or any other permanently stained colored cereal will be mashed into the carpet for your new normal, never to come out - not even with military weapons. As you can tell, the décor will center on the food your children will feed their own child day and night.

And speaking of food, in preparation for the arrival of this child, the kitchen will be the war room. Every counter space, cabinet and refrigerator space will be taken over for the production of a meal for the one child.

Eating is a different motif these days. I know, when you were bringing up children, a meal was just that. Breakfast was considered adequate with a single bowl of cereal and fruit, perhaps some orange juice. But the new normal is different now. You have to start days before and harvest the crop, whether it is fruit or vegetables. If it involves chicken or meat, the product must not contain anything but the DNA of the animal. That exclusion includes Tour de France doping products and steroids used by athletes with biceps the size of a Third World country. But your children consider it well worthwhile based on scientific evidence written by an author recommended by Oprah.

Then the picked harvest has to be washed, skinned, sung over, mashed and put in any kind of device where it is pulsed to death. No antibiotics or processed chemicals will get near the final product. Which is a good thing; just don’t ever tell the mother of your grandchild that the dog tasted half the breakfast before it was served. Hey, what goes on in your kitchen stays in your kitchen.

And don’t be surprised if your husband finds an ice cube of organic squash floating in his Manhattan; many mothers find it prudent to freeze their mixtures in ice trays. Just saying.

This kind of meal is organic, natural and most of it will be scraped off of your walls, floors and ceilings long after your grandchild has left. This is part of the decorating called “Les Minue Bonjour.”

Now, I don’t have a grandchild this age anymore. Mine are all adults, living the mature lifestyle by going to college and partying so hard they have to call in the department of transportation in that state to move them all back to their dorms with a front loader. But I sure do have the memories. And for that I am grateful. Believe it or not, every time I see a blueberry-stained sofa, I still tear up.