Dinner everyday with little kids can get really dull. Same thing every night. They don’t talk. They don’t like the food. They make a mess. Here’s how to serve up some magic and make dinner with your small children special again.
There was a time when mealtime at our house got really old. It was BORING. It was when I had babies and preschoolers at home with me all day. My Man was very occupied with med school and sometimes would not be able to come home until 9:00 p.m. So often it turned out that me and my little ones would be eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner together alone, day after day.
This wasn’t so horrible, except that we had already spent the whole day together and so we didn’t have much to talk about. Discussing how many times my kidlets pooped in the potty or what was new on Dora didn’t seem to make our meals enjoyable for me (especially because their vocab was still in-the-making).
Dinner was dull. I found that I would eat quickly because of the lack of conversation, and then dinner was done in 5 minutes. And then what? 2 hours, 17 minutes, and 38 seconds until Daddy came home . . .
So I finally came up with a solution. I decided to read books to my children at dinnertime when My Man was gone. That is it. It made dinnertime special again. We would check out many fun books at the library and looked forward to reading them at dinner.
* It helped the kidlets love reading.
* It made me slow down and enjoy my meal.
* It made dinner last longer and feel more special.
* It gave us something to talk about.
So now that My Man is home more often, we don’t need this nightly ritual as much. We enjoy normal dinners together. But when My Man is gone, I satisfactorily smile when my kidlets say, “If Daddy is gone for dinner can we please read a book?!?”
And that, my friends, is that power of motherhood.
Be creative. Think of simple ways to make hard times special. Make each day meaningful.
