Emma drew this past week’s tip:
Make tonight’s dinner fancy – drink milk out of wine glasses. Canadian families spend less time eating together at the table than ever before.
I fleetingly wondered if early wine glass usage is linked to early experiments with alcohol… and then quickly nixed the idea and forged ahead. ;)
Sadly (for the girls) they didn’t get to use the fine crystal. They had to make do with our everyday wine glasses for their milk. These are very inexpensive and wouldn’t hurt my heart if they broke one or two. (You can get a set of six wine glasses at Ikea for about four bucks.)
I think we may have even lit the candles.
Shaking up the dinner routine is a neat idea, and it’s very easy to do. This tip reminded me of one of our Christmas Advent activities to “dress fancy” for dinner. (Fancy dress, of course, being subject to interpretation.) We’ve had hilarious results with it. Lacy gowns from the dressup trunk make simple dinners like homemade mac & cheese a little more fun. And the girls get a huge kick out of seeing their daddy wearing a tie for once.
The idea behind the “milk in fancy glasses” tip is to encourage family dinners. At this point we don’t have a problem sitting down as a family to eat our evening meal. I work from home. Mark works regular hours. The girls aren’t doing any activities that interfere with dinnertime (which is usually at 6:00 pm at our house). This means we’re having dinner together seven days a week.
Family dinners are very important to me. Although I’m not cooking up roasts or creating elaborate meals, we are together, sitting around the same table. And I think that’s pretty good… even on the days when I throw my hands up in the air (or alternately bury my head in my hands) and want to scream things about ketchup not being a vegetable.
There is a great article about the benefits of family dinners over on the Time Magazine website. It’s from 2006, but it is still worth a read.
I love this part:
“…it’s the experts in adolescent development who wax most emphatic about the value of family meals, for it’s in the teenage years that this daily investment pays some of its biggest dividends. Studies show that the more often families eat together, the less likely kids are to smoke, drink, do drugs, get depressed, develop eating disorders and consider suicide, and the more likely they are to do well in school, delay having sex, eat their vegetables, learn big words and know which fork to use. “If it were just about food, we would squirt it into their mouths with a tube,” says Robin Fox, an anthropologist who teaches at Rutgers University in New Jersey, about the mysterious way that family dinner engraves our souls. “A meal is about civilizing children. It’s about teaching them to be a member of their culture.”
I like how family dinners are described as a daily investment… because that’s really what it is. We are investing in our children and our future as a family. Food for thought, isn’t it?
As for this coming week, here’s what we’re doing:
Have fresh veggies and fruit in the fridge for ready-to-eat snacks.
I think I can handle this one. But I have to clean out the fridge first. :)
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This post is part of the Know More Do More initiative spearheaded by the Champlain Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Network. KMDM is about empowering parents and inspiring them to take charge of their children’s health by taking easy steps to increase activity levels and improve eating habits. I’m one of two champion families who has been asked to take this challenge. You can join too. Check out the official website for more information. You can also get healthy tips by following @knowmoredomore on Twitter. If you’re blogging about your participation, please let me know so we can cheer each other on!
