Coffee At Home

I've always loved coffee. When I was very young, I begged my dad to try his coffee, and he said if I drank all of the cream out of the creamer on a table at the restaurant he would fill the creamer cup with coffee for me. I drank four and he a little surprised and annoyed followed through and gave me four little creamer cups of coffee.

I continued to have it on rare occasion at funerals (there were a lot when I was a kid) and in college when I went out with friends, but I never got into having it regularly. As an adult, when I was working out of the home, I would have a special cup of coffee on really bad days at work or when I was super tired as a treat to myself. But when I had a baby, I realized that I was more tired than I'd ever been, and sometimes in a day there wasn't time to shower or pee on my own, but I could squeeze in a cup of coffee even if it took hours to drink it. Oftentimes, I'd get that coffee out, and Noah and all of his adorable charm scored me regular free white chocolate mochas at Starbucks. Other days, I would make coffee for myself at home.

And so began one of the biggest struggles of my life. I would buy coffee, use cold filtered water, follow all of the instructions, and then I would brew my coffee and cry inside as I would take a sip of it. It didn't matter if it was black, with organic cream and sugar, with fat free hazelnut creamer or served on a unicorn. That liquid that I learned to think of as magic juice was horrible at home. It caused me so much stress, and I would talk to friends that either dubbed themselves horrible coffeemakers or good ones. One even offered to come over and make coffee at my house to see if I was missing a step every time or not reading the instructions correctly. You know the ones that say put 1 or 2 or however many tablespoons per 6 oz or 8 oz cup.

I finally decided to take a poll and asked the friends that were good coffeemakers, at least in their own minds, what kind of coffeemakers they had. And an overwhelming amount of them had nicer coffeemakers than me. Then I asked the self-dubbed bad coffeemakers what kind of coffemakers they had and an overwhelming majority had cheap ones or ones along the lines of the coffeemaker I had. Now, there were rare respondents that had cheap coffeemakers and loved them or had expensive ones and hated them. I allowed for an error margin of one or two on each side.*

A few days ago, Ash asked me what our amazon.com log in information is, and then he let me know that he'd be ordering my birthday present. I decided he was ordering me a kindle after a conversation with my mom, and I made sure not to open my yahoo account and risk seeing the confirmation email about the birthday gift purchase. A day later the UPS man dropped a bigger than a kindle box off, and I immediately realized that I was getting the coffeemaker I'd been walking around complaining I didn't have.

A gift that will keep giving

I'll admit, when I went to make the coffee this morning, I made sure I had freshly ground good coffee, organic cream and o sugar so I could see if the coffee had the potential to wow me. In the past, perfect ingredients have yielded less than satisfactory results.

I made two cups because Ash and I each wanted one with breakfast. I took a sip, and I will be honest, it will be hard to pay money (on the days we don't get our usual free drink) for a cup of coffee. That coffee is amazing, and I can now say, I am a good coffee preparer. Today for lunch, I plan to make more coffee and to eat it with the yummy cupcakes my parents sent me from Georgetown Cupcake for my birthday. Happy almost birthday to me!

*This is clearly the most scientific poll ever taken about coffeemakers so feel free to quote my results ad nauseam.