Thank you for all the positive support! I really appreciate it - I think the freak out was mostly about the stress of building a house in general. Now that we are in the final stretches the decisions have really piled up on us. I have to keep reminding myself that I'm the only one who has to love it!

I don't think it was Silestone, but the Caesarstone look-alike that I saw, but Christopher Peacock used it for his showroom in San Francisco, and it actually looks really really nice. I was surprised. I wonder if he was paid by them to install it? :) It certainly is a good marketing tool because while I was there, a few of the other people walking through the showroom remarked that they thought it looked really good for not being marble.

Um, Silestone Eternal Statuario?

We have Corian ... it's around forty years old and looks pretty much the same as ever. It's not plasticky, but it certainly doesn't feel like the granite on our island either. It's a nice, smooth, non-porous surface and super easy to clean. We even had accidental sharpie bleed through, and it came off with SoftScrub; you'd never know it ever happened. There might be a few marks where the point of a knife hit, but I couldn't tell you were those are. You shouldn't cut on your countertop, anyways; it's terrible for your knives, but yes, there's always a chance the knife runs off the edge of the cutting board or something, so it is something to consider. Corian can be sanded or micro sanded to remove cut marks if they're not too deep; we've never had to. Our Corian is white with cream marbling (no names back then ... you just picked white, cream, or white/cream marbled), and it doesn't show dust; it will show crumbs and such. The polished black granite island shows everything, especially fingerprints. I don't mind seeing dust and crumbs, since we'd rather know they're there to be cleaned up, but the fingerprints are annoying. We have the same Corian in one bathroom (counter and sink) that looks great and cleans great there, too. The other bathroom has white Corian, it has a dent from where something fell, but other than that no issues with it either. I'd get Corian again. My sister's granite counters are classic cream and brown speckle, and they always look great despite toddlers and cats and whatever they knock over. They have to be cleaned constantly (toddlers, cats ...), but a quick wipedown is all it takes. If you get on just the right angle you might find some toddler prints, but the pattern seems to hide them.