It’s 11:00am, and I’m seriously considering making dinner tonight.

This is significant in a number of ways.  There are more days than I’d like to admit when putting an evening meal together just isn’t top of my list, and the times when I’ve made it a priority I’ve experienced what one might call a notable lack of positive reinforcement.  (Hello there, T-man and Bear.)

If I do manage to think about dinner, it’s usually a semi-panicky revelation right before BrightSide comes home.  As in oh crap, it’s 5:30, what on earth are the kids gonna eat?!

So for me to be thinking about making dinner, and at 11:00 in the morning no less, is a big step in the right direction.  Or it means I’m hungry for lunch.  Either way, I’ve gotten food focused.

In January I wrote about nailing this parenting thing, but there are oh so many other ways I’m killing it.  Besides only randomly feeding my family, I mean.  I figure why not cop to the whole kit and caboodle?

**  Some kids show up to playdates in color coordinated outfits straight out of L.L. Bean.  They have matching shirts and shorts, plus nice leather belts to boot.  The other week Bear sewed up a hole in her pants on the way to school.  So yeah, there’s that.

**  I can’t figure out when our mail carrier comes.  This seems like a routine sort of thing, something I really ought to be able to nail down, but nope.  Some days it’s early, some days it’s late, some days I wonder if he shows up at all.  And as wonky as it sounds, after the second check on the mailbox in a day I just don’t feel like popping out there again.  (Lazy bones, I know.)

**  It’s not at all uncommon for my kid to put on his shoes as I’m driving him to school.  I don’t know why this bothers me so much – probably because I feel like it’s getting his day off to a flustered start.  Then again, they’re his feet.  He’s gonna have to be responsible for his shoes at the very least.

**  You’d think the hardest part about eating healthy would be, well, deciding to eat healthy, right?  But you’d be wrong.  The hardest part comes from being a child of the ’70s with echoes of “clean your plate, there are starving children in Africa who would love that food” ringing through your memory banks.  Voices from childhood so deeply ingrained that it’s impossible to simply throw out the junk food, so now we’re caught in a long, slow transition to a new pantry.

**  Making my grandmother’s spaghetti sauce can only be described as a labor of love, with an emphasis on both.  It is seriously labor intensive – chopping, sautéing, browning meatballs, simmering sauce for hours on end – it’s an endeavor that’s not for the weak of heart.  But it also brings out the best of home.  The very smell elicits memories of my mother working in the kitchen and family dinners around the table.  Now ask me how often I make the sauce for BrightSide.  Yeah.  I’m averaging about once every three years or so.  I can only imagine what grandma would say.

**  My niece is just over three months old now, and right after she was born it was made abundantly clear that nobody would meet Cee Cee without getting a Tdap.  Both of my kids are up to date, BrightSide’s run in with a rusty tool last year had him covered…which left me on the chopping block.  I managed to procrastinate my way through the beginning of the year, but by the end of February it was crunch time.  If I wanted to see my niece baptized, I’d have to get that vaccination.  Sometimes I work better with deadlines.

**  Not for nothing, but that Tdap hurts like a beyotch.  ‘Nuff said.

**  I’m habitually one of the last parents to pick up Bear from her after school clubs.  I have a bazillion alarms set on my phone to remind me to leave, and we don’t live far from the school so I can’t use traffic as an excuse.  But it seems I suck at standing around making small talk with other parents as we wait for the kids to get done, so Bear’s stuck with my introverted parental pickup deficiencies.  Let’s call it character building.