Family Dinners

We have a horrible, terrible habit of eating dinner in front of the TV.

My mother would be appalled.  My family never, ever ate in front of the TV.  If we were allowed to even just read while we were eating, it was for a snack or a solitary breakfast.  And even that was rare.  Mealtimes were sacred.

Unfortunately, because I'm usually exhausted by the time I get home these days, all I want to do is stuff my face with food and watch some mindless TV.  So we slid into a very bad habit.  At first, it was an occasional special event, and we'd joke how we were eating "American style tonight".  And then it became a special event to NOT eat dinner that way.

When I'm by myself, I have no problem with TV dining.  But it's different when it comes to eating with your seven-year-old son.  I'd like to him to have some brain cells left by the time he's looking at colleges.

So I put my foot down.  And we've been doing really well. We even instituted a family ritual that I adopted from the famous dooce: we take turns saying one bad thing that happened that day, one good thing, and one thing we're grateful for.  

Examples:
- My parents joined us the other night and my father said the one bad thing that had happened to him was that a boa constrictor had strangled him while he was cleaning out the pool.
- D's one good thing is that he took our #2 dog, Isis, on a car ride in the beautiful spring weather (our #1 dog gets horribly carsick, so he was confined to the homestead).


- What E is grateful for: dinner.