I recently posed the What Age Were Your Kids When You Started Having Family Dinner? topic to Twitter and thought I’d bring it here, as well. Also of interest to me (and Elizabeth recently posted on this same topic) is the discussion of what your kids eat (i.e.: do they eat what you eat or something different?)
With regard to the family dinner discussion, I was surprised (and impressed!) at the amount of people who did family dinner every night and had since their kids were born. We very rarely do family dinners and there are a lot of reasons, but the main one is that I am selfish and I’d rather eat with just Chris while we watch our shows (which we typically get on East Coast time, three hours ahead, i.e.: dinner time, thanks to DirecTV — one of their only redeeming qualities.) Also, I prefer to not have someone grunting and whining at me for more food while I’m trying to enjoy my meal.
Also a problem is the fact that LG does not chew reliably, so until she can, we’re sort of forced to feed her something different than what we’re having. For example, last night we made this pork loin (please make it — the sauce is so good I would like to just drink it plain), which is not really conducive to swallowing whole (LG’s preferred eating method.) I feel like if we’re feeding her something different, then she can just eat that and we’ll eat later. She usually eats while we’re cooking dinner for ourselves, and so we’re all in the kitchen together, listening to music and chopping onions and shit and truthfully, it’s one of my favorite times of the day, so that helps me reconcile the not-eating-as-a-family thing.
Another problem is that she typically goes to bed before we eat dinner, which is something I’d really like to change, but she just cannot hang past like 6:30pm. It is my hope that one day soon her bedtime will push back and hopefully that will align with her being able to chew and not choke herself, and maybe we can sit together for dinner a couple nights a week. Not every night, not on steak night, say, or any night where a good show is on TV (I’m sort of kidding), but it would be nice to do some meals together, teach her how to have good manners, other parenting things, etc.
Moving on to the topic of cooking for your kids and what they eat and making separate meals and whatnot…I am really very impressed that Elizabeth’s kids eat more or less what she and Mr. E eat (go Elizabeth!) and like I said, I’d like to get there someday soon. Meanwhile, I don’t really mind making separate food for LG. She will eat pretty much anything, so that’s nice and oftentimes she eats leftovers from our meal the night before, so I’m not worried that she is going to be a kid who only eats PB&Js, but if she is, oh well, I think that’s a normal kid thing and I can’t say I will have it in me to argue about that. I’ve already found myself saying, “But you always loved pineapple!” and god, I don’t care. Don’t eat the pineapple, then. More for me.
Obviously, it’s just the one kid and she does go to school twice a week (more often if I get a job and we can put her back in school full-time), so the meals we’re required to cook separately for her aren’t that many. Maybe I’d care more if I was making six meals a day, seven days a week. Oy.
Anyway, so that’s how we do dinner here. I feel like we’re in flux with it and am sort of itching for the day when we can do family dinners, but in the meantime, what we’re doing is working now and Chris and I get lots of quality time in the evenings, which is always good. What do YOU do in your house?
Ugh, dinner. The kids are hungry (6) before we eat, if I’m cooking something I KNOW the will eat, then I cook early but we eat a lot of spicy food and 95% of our dinners are paleo and the boys are not having that shit. It’s a mess- Mike gets home about 6:30 and bedtime is 7:30 and it’s a mad dash for me to cook,eat, clean up, bathe them and get them to bed on time and Mike wants to play with them and man, I just hate night time.
Once Ro was able to sit up in his highchair and experiment with solids, around 6 months old, we’ve eaten dinner all together, all the time. We made a conscious decision not to make vastly different meals for him from the very beginning to foster good eating habits at an early age, and for the most part, this has worked well for us. Before he could really chew, we would grind up whatever we were eating (unless it was spicy)(even meat) with a small food mill, and he got his dinner that way. He didn’t love everything, and some things he loved as a baby, he won’t touch now with a 10-foot pole (tomato sauce being the most maddening of all — I mean, come on, kid!), or vice versa. Ro never had an early bedtime, even as a baby, so feeling rushed to get dinner on the table earlier than we wanted or were able to was never an issue. Mostly we rush to get dinner on the table earlier these days because he’s so hungry and would eat a loaf of cheese between 5 and 6, if we let him.
I think everyone does what works best for them, and it sounds like that’s exactly what you are doing with LG. She will most definitely change and mature and regress and advance, and whatever you’re doing now doesn’t have to be in stone. Honestly, I think it’s more important to sit down all together once kids are in elementary school, as a way to touch base without the distractions of TV or smart phones. If you can do it sooner, because it works and makes sense and feels right, great! I’m sure you share other meals, like breakfasts and lunches, from time to time, right? That counts, too.
We are lame old people and we have become accustomed to eating with the children at…five o’clock. I know. I KNOW.
Sometimes the girls get hungry at 430 and I go ahead and feed them and then we do “grown-up dinner” at a reasonable hour (7) after they are in bed. We will also usually do this if we are having a “special” dinner, which really means “Mommy legit cooked tonight instead of defrosting from the freezer.”
But I’d say that 60% of the time, the four of us are at the table together and it’s kind of nice. Now that Charlotte can sit in her chair at the table, it’s decent.
Obv, all bets are off now that Preston is on the scene. At this point it’s like “FEED THEM AND SEND THEM TO BED ASAP FTLOG.”
I always give Anna a little plate of what we are eating to get her used to it but she usually eats more around 4. We ask her to come sit with us when we sit down to eat but lots of the time she’d rather watch tv and we are ok with peaceful dinner. She is pretty good at eating out in restaurants which is nice. I just don’t push it. She’s 3. If she were 8 I would care more. I hope by offering and making it no big deal it will eventually happen.
We sort of got thrown into family dinners together. We didn’t do it when Kalena was a baby, and then when I got laid off we moved back in with my parents (and grandma) so we started all having dinner together. Kalena was 1. We’ve kept it up since then, but we eat early- before 6 almost every night. Some days the kids are really hungry early and I let them have cold cereal or something for dinner at 4:30, but most of the time they just eat what we eat, when we eat.
Lunch is a totally different story, by the way. I fix something for the kids, then they eat while I fix something else for myself, and they play while I eat.
Your routine is a lot like ours (and sweet lord alive do I love a quiet dinner with a plate of something tasty and TEEVEE!).
Dinnertime has evolved a lot because Ezra used to conk out like LG at 6:30pm and come home ravenous from daycare. Then Iris came along. Then Ezra got older. Then Iris started eating by mouth. T still travels a lot.
So usually Ezra and Iris eat at 6ish or so at our table in the kitchen while I putter about and put things away. Occasionally, I’ll sit down with them but I’m a really slow eater and hate being rushed (also, no tv). Then T and I will eat once they’re in bed around 8ish or so.
On the weekends, we tend to do eat breakfast and lunch together.
We eat dinner all together (though not always the same thing) around 5:30. It’s super early, but Bill gets home from work at 4, so it’s do-able. He’s also off to work by 5 am, so all three of us are in bed fairly early.
We try and offer Henry at least a little bit of whatever we’re having (unless it’s super spicy) which works to varying degrees of success. If he’s not into it, then I do fix him something else because he’s obviously just a baby and needs to eat. BUT, he’s been a bit more adventurous food-wise lately so I’ve been doing this less and less.