Remember when dinner used to be easy?  A simple matter of when you would eat.  Whether to stay in or go out.  Whether you felt like Italian, Mexican, Thai, steakhouse…those were good times.

This meal is now carrying an extremely heavy load.  As a matter of fact, I really can’t just call it dinner now.  It’s more like Dinner or DINNER or DINNER if you factor in all the issues involved.

First there’s the whole “kids need family time” thing.  There are all these studies (parenting pressure alert) that show being connected as a family is important to child development and a great time to connect is over dinner.  Conceptually, yes.  I’ve bonded with plenty of people over food.  But this is typically right around the witching hour in our house: the kids have survived their day at school, completed homework and their chores, (hopefully) scored some play time outside, and (usually) fit in an extracurricular like tae kwon do class.  They’re starting to fray a bit around the edges and just as they’re coming to a boil — BAM!  We’re sitting them down at the table for “real” food and family conversation.

There’s also the actual food itself.  There are four people at the table, two of them under the age of 11, and I’m supposed to put something out there that all four will not only eat but also at least moderately enjoy?  (Oh, and the AMA wants it to be a balanced meal, too.)  Let me tell you the number of times I’ve been successful at this in the last three months.  ZERO.  Exactly NONE.  I’m confident in this statistic because in my quest for easy but tasty meals I’ve been trying out new recipes (nothing weird, though, because I know my audience) and surveying the group — thumbs up, thumbs down, or “eh, not my favorite.”  And every single meal has at least one dissenting vote, no matter how delicious the food is.  I swear, sometimes I think they’re doing it just to watch my head explode.  T-man used to be the pickiest eater, but Bear has been the most disagreeable as of late.  Last night, for example…I made this recipe from Pioneer Woman that was YUMMY.  (Right after I finish this I’m going over to my Recipes page to figure out how to put a link on there.)  It’s “Shells & cheese (with bacon & peas)” — with the exception of the peas, which you can easily pick out, my daughter loves every food item in there.  Pasta!  Cheese!  Bacon!  What’s not to love, right?  It was only by the grace of God that I managed not to snatch her out of her chair when she spit her first bite into her napkin.  Do you know what that child ate for dinner?  The extra plain pasta shells left in the pot on the back of the stove.  Mmmmm, starch.  Dinner of champions.

In case the quality family time and quest for edible food isn’t enough, let’s add in the importance of teaching proper table manners.  Funny factoid: I adore Miss Manners.  Always have, even as a little girl, which I admit is a little weird.  So in my naive youth (ie. pre-kids) I thought this portion of mealtime would actually be kind of fun.  Imagine my surprise when the first issue to arise was which bodily functions were and were not appropriate at the dinner table.  (I guess I hadn’t spent a lot of time eating with young kids; this really shouldn’t have come as such a shock.)  I don’t know about you, but I find I enjoy my meals slightly less when my bites get squeezed between sentences like “We do not poot at the table,” “No burping,” or “Chew with your mouth closed.”

The art of dinner conversation is another super fun skill we try to develop.  Do you know how hard it is to carry on an interesting and animated conversation with someone who responds with one word answers?  I know, I know, I need to make my questions more open-ended…but dammit, it’s the witching hour for me, too, and my brain is tired.  But my greater responsibility to society keeps haunting me: how can I send these kids out into the world unable to hold up their end of a conversation?  They will be fraying the social fabric with their lack of civilized discourse.

The course requirements for dinner have gotten serious.  I’m thinking we may be falling a bit short, but I’m just gonna keep banging my head against that wall in the hope of making progress.  Plus a girl’s gotta eat, you know…