Paper, plastic, or cloth?

So right now I'm rearranging our smallish dining room. It houses an old kitchen table (prob 2X2 feet square), a piano, a smallish corner bookcase for the cookbooks and phone, and the current, very ugly dining room table. The old kitchen table just became (for the 2nd time) the corner table in the living room. Tomorrow, a little kids table and chair set from IKEA will take its place. But the rearranging is not what this is all about. As I was going through the dining room stuff, I started thinking about my great table linens. I have beautiful table cloths. I love beautiful table linens. But we are a family with a small, very, very messy child. Which means a table cloth is lucky to get through 24 seconds of food on the table without being totally dirty and usually even stained. Sometimes I give in to my desires and put on the cloth, even when it's just a "normal" weeknight with the 3 of us eating. One of my favorites is bright red with multi-colores strips. It looks like the prettiest serape you've seen. I just washed it after a messy breakfast. How can scrambled eggs get ground into cloth? And the ketchup, oh the ketchup. We have become the plastic table cloth family, and it makes my sister cringe. My sister is in LA studying to be an interior designer, and thinks I'm committing a grievous sin by covering my ugly table in (gasp!) plastic (gasp!). The Sister is obviously Not A Parent, and not a parent of a Very Messy Toddler. I truly appreciate she has my best fashion sense in mind - heck, I would totally love to have a catalog-perfect home (and hopefully, with her help, I just might one day), but I also appreciate that she does not want to come to my house to wash a tablecloth a day. Scratch that - 3 tablecloths a day. Yes, we're that messy. And yes, the table is that ugly - ugly to the point that if we leave it without a tablecloth it might frighten small children who come over to play with Jacob. If not the children, definately their mothers. And I need them all to come over, because I really like the break that they give me. **Sidenote: I type fast. And it took me an hour to type this out. Why? Well, during the hour, I read the same Barney train book to Jacob at least 3 times (the staples are coming out and pages are starting to fall apart, we might be in Big Trouble), typed a little, played airplane with Jacob on my feet until my big toe kept cramping and I gave up, typed a little, and then had Jacob spit into my hand masticated string cheese, thick with saliva. Thanks, Jacob. After all, I guess it was Christmas just this morning.