I can remember sitting at our breakfast nook, growing up, and eating dinner (we called it supper in Iowa but I married into a family of people who deem it as "dinner" and it stuck with me ever since.....sorry, parents). It was always a good time with my family because we are jokesters so you might have caught us at a time when we were throwing food at one another or making jokes about bathroom/bodily functions. We would discuss our day at school and anything else that would come up. I'm married now with my own family and I make it a point to have those same sit down dinners, together. It's important to my husband and me to have that quality time with our kids to talk about their day, unwind, and laugh....usually a lot.
We live in a society where everyone is busy and I don't mean normal busy but crazy busy. Your neighbor (or YOU) has their (your) son, Billy, out for: band, choir, FFA, NBA, NFL, FLMCBSK (Future Lego Mine Craft Builders of Southwest Kansas), travel baseball (which is normally a summer sport but that's not good enough so Billy is in travel baseball that runs all year long and when it's winter time, Billy has to travel to warmer climates, like Panama, to play baseball so the family flies to Panama every other weekend to watch Billy play baseball). It's quite a long list of activities that Billy is out for so it's hard for them to have a sit down dinner every night. The family usually drives through Mickey D's and throws some fries and a half soy/half who-knows-what-animal-patty at Billy to down before his 210,000 activities he attends.
Does this sound familiar? Our kids are only with us for a mere 18 years (unless you're the parent that will allow Billy to live in your basement until he's 35). The time goes extremely fast as I have a 17 year old and an almost 16 year old and it seems like yesterday they were just wee lads. Our kids do things but nothing extreme. We have youth group, Boy Scouts, another church event, Badminton club, wrestling, and track. All of these things are spaced out and on different days. Three of the things only run for certain seasons and then they're done.
Some of these events are during the dinner hour. For instance, one of our church organizations is on Sunday evening where my husband and son are gone from 5:00-7:45pm. I, for one, cannot eat dinner before 5:00pm because I'm not living in a nursing home.....yet (hopefully, if we play our cards right, our kids will take care of us and let us live at their sprawling estate someday). On Sundays, I have dinner ready to eat by the time they get back home so we don't eat dinner until 8pm. I know that's late but it's more important to me that we eat together than eat at separate times just because it's late. There were times where we did eat separately due to our kids having summer jobs.
I do realize that it won't happen every night where you can eat dinner together but try to get at least one or two nights where you sit down, as a family, and enjoy each other's company and have some good heart to heart discussions. For the love of Pete and all his brothers and sisters, put the cell phones away too. Look at each other's faces and have real talks. Your kids will love it and so will you. To this day, I remember those family dinners and they mean a lot to me......even if we were talking about bathroom humor.
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