All Rileyed UpGet Back to the Table Month
With the start of the new school year, I’ve already started receiving the food paperwork. There’s the request to only pack healthy lunches, the list of books about vegetable eating, and the positive results of sitting down to a family dinner – your kids will be smarter, say no to drugs, have more confidence, and win the lottery (I made one of those up – can you guess which?).
I grew up in a house where the family dinner took place every single evening. There were seven people – my mother, father, grandmother, and me and my siblings. We sat down and held hands and said grace before meals, and when dinner was done, we said grace after meals and then prayed a decade of the rosary, except on Sundays, when we said the whole rosary. Ah, Catholicism.
Family dinners are much harder to pull off these days, now that I’m the one running the family, partly because Husband’s work schedule is erratic and partly because I am a lazy bum. It’s not like we never sit down together, I just don’t emphasize it as part of the daily routine. For a while, it wasn’t a big deal to me, but now that the kids are getting older, I feel a need to give them something to remember, a time the whole family can count on being together. Plus, I want them to be smarter, say no to drugs, and have more confidence.
Libby’s Vegetables and Sara Evans have launched Get Back to the Table Month, to help slackers like me get the family dinner up and running. The website includes coupons for Libby’s canned veggies (my kids like the sweet peas), recipes, and shopping and kitchen tips. You can also submit your own tips to win a chance for dinner with Sara Evans backstage at one of her shows – talk about a family dinner that your kids will never forget.
So, time to get cracking in your kitchen. Make a casserole. Bake a meatloaf. Throw everything in a crock pot and let it do the work. And when in doubt, heed the advice of this parking spot:
Taken at the parking lot at The Camp in Costa Mesa
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3 Responses to “Get Back to the Table Month”
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I suspect you made up the ‘win the lottery’ which is too bad because, were it true, I would consume my weight in sweet potatoes right now.
We sit down at the table for a family dinner every night. When my first two kids were younger it was sometimes painful, often involving tantrums and a whole lot of refusing to eat. I don’t know if sitting as a family for all those years is responsible, but now our dinners are completely civilized and (mostly) consumed. Except for the two-year-old: she is a work in progress.
We sit down every night, too. If you can pull it off, I think it’s really important for all family members, especially as the kids get older. It gets more tempting to dispense with it as the homework and afterschool activities pile up, but we’ve made a commitment to try not to schedule things that interfere with family dinner time. If you’re the one cooking, it’s important to set rules about table discussions, such as “no one gets to say anything negative about the food mom prepared. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” It’s all part of teaching them how to be civilized and polite. If they don’t like it they don’t have to eat it, but I don’t have to hear about it!
[...] blogger at All Rileyed Up also recalls family dinners while she was growing up (complete with grace before meals, grace after [...]