Going back a generation or two, dinner time was family time, a time of conversation and togetherness.
Being a family that worked hard on the land and with a winemaking tradition going back to the Adriatic Sea, this time took on even more significance for my family.
Skip forward to today with microwaves, pre-packaged meals, TV and the general pace of life, and meal times in the traditional sense have all but disappeared for many families.
Earlier this year, Bridget & I decide to ‘make a stand’ for our own family, and I thought I would share this with you quickly because it has been great for us.
To begin with, I love cooking, I find it relaxing. Bridget hates cooking, and finds it… not relaxing. Bridget does most of the other things to keep a house running, and she works here at the winery as well and runs the kids all around, so on a Sunday I happily prepare about 6 meals for the week, which I freeze.
Our kids see me cooking ‘real’ food with ‘real’ ingredients, and in fact they are pretty good in the kitchen themselves!
One of the the main things for me is they understand that in our house food is important and deserves respect – that food is something that has been grown and nurtured by a person somewhere and is more than just a source of nutrients. I keep it fun and they enjoy all sorts of food and flavours – most of the time!
Apart from some ‘escapes’ throughout the year, dinner is about the only time our family is regularly together without various distractions.
To be honest, it has been something we have had to make a concerted effort to do, because at the end of a day of work, kids sport & dance practice, and all the other things that need to be done, sitting in front of the TV to eat is a lot ‘easier’!
Our time at the table has become a bit of a revelation though, thanks to a suggestion we had given to us last year.
We go ‘around’ the table (Bridget and I plus Dominic who is almost 12 and Emma who is almost 10) and each have to answer three questions…
- What is the best thing that happened in your day today?
- What did you learn today?
- What do you love about someone in our family today?
Now this might seem a bit naff, and some of you might even be barfing about now. I am not very ‘new age’ myself and this felt a bit weird to begin with I must admit.
But I can tell you that from these three quick questions, we all learn a lot about what has gone on in our days. It can be very revealing!
If nothing else it makes each of us realize that no matter how small, something good happened to us today, we learned something new, and that there is always something to love about someone in the family.
We aren’t the Cosby Show – ours isn’t the ‘perfect family’ (whose is?!).
You might already do something like this, and if you do, that is fantastic.
But if you don’t, just try these three questions for yourself around the table with the TV switched off, even if it is just you and one other. It might take a couple of weeks for it not to feel ’strange’, but I am willing to bet that you will learn something about your partner / daughter / son and that they will learn something about you – every day! You might even learn something about YOU.
Go on, do it tonight!
Bon appétit!
Darryl
Darryl, thanks for sharing with us your family meal routine, it sounds lovely. One thing I do with my daughter when I pick her up from school is that she must immediately tell me something good that happened to her that day. It works so well, we laugh all of the way home. It used to be that she would tell me all of the “bad” stuff as soon as she got in the car. It became miserable. Now she forgets to share the “bad” stuff and it makes for a more pleasant evening.
We do have a unofficial rule that we eat together each evening. I may try and incorporate some of your ideas in to our precious time together.
Hope to come to the winery again this year. We were the family from the US that went to your “wild” dinner last June.
Take care.
Sharon Katzin
Thanks for the comment Brandon.
With 2 kids at school, we will throw your suggestion into the mix as well!
Excellent advice! We’ve been asking the “What is the best thing that happened in your day today” question at meal time for quite a while, but we haven’t been asking the other two. We do now.
Another question I’ve recently started asking is “What feedback did you get at school today?” This came about after reading the latest Metro article “Best Schools”. They quoted Debra Masters, Visible Learning Laboratories, University of Auckland who said there are two good questions to judge how good a school is. One question is to a teacher and the other to your child…
“What feedback did you get today?”
“Not how good it was, not what they’re doing, and not even what they learned. Ask what the teacher said to them and wrote on their work.”