I wanted to headline tonight with this absolutely lovely photo of Calvin and Janna, who was hear from Durham this weekend and whom we already miss very much. It was a wonderful weekend. Just look at all the beauty and joy in those faces!
Because now I have to tell you about dinner here tonight. Disasterville.
I don’t mean that the food was bad. The small amount that traveled from my fork to my mouth was a perfectly acceptable weeknight, not-going-to-win-prizes-but-decent rice and vegetables thing. It was the savages-- I mean children-- seated to my right and to my left that made the meal something to be endured.
Audrey whined and fretted and finally left the table having eaten exactly nothing. Calvin picked up his rice and chucked it at us in handfuls, so he was taken from the table, screaming. (No we will not act like that at the table, young man. And get your fork out of my eye socket this instant!) Scott and I looked across the table at each other with a combination of shock and resignation that is the flip side of the parenting coin, the other side being the “How can we be so lucky?!” side. Dinner tonight made us both wonder what on earth we had wrought. How did we get from our giddy first date when we ate barbeque and asked each other, oh-so-lighly, about future children, to this grim scene of pouting, threats and spat-out pieces of avocado?
Now that it’s all cleaned up, the dishes washed and the remains scraped off the floor, I must say I am feeling like the sit-down family dinners are-- for the time-being anyway-- not worth the trouble. Yes, it’s good to teach children about ritual and routine, about manners and healthy eating, but then I look at the facts on the ground and I think it might be better to just put some cold cereal into dog dishes and serve it on the floor. I’ll get down there and eat with them if that would make it more of a family ritual.
Not really.
Well, maybe.
I need some sleep before I consider the matter any further.
1 comment:
If Ivo is strapped into his chair and wrapped in a bib, he may smear, fling and draw with whatever food is in reach, but at least we know that the child's extremities, and the tabletop, floor, and parents in their immediate vicinity will receive all but the most enthusiastically-hurled foodstuffs.
Outside those confines, he won't sit still to eat and during his itinerant meals finds too many happy distractions: feeding his food to the dog, dumping it on the bed, pushing handfuls under the fridge, wading in it, painting with it.
As trying as the family meal ritual can be, I can't but insist on it these days.
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