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Serving Up Love

Lately I had a conversation with a friend about food.  She is frustrated because her family doesn't want to eat the diet that she wants to eat.  I won't go into details except to say that she is pretty committed to eating a lot of vegetables and raw as much as possible.

I've been thinking about this ever since.  I think our diet is moderately healthy.  I try to include as many vegetables and fruits in our diet as I can.  I'm sure it could be healthier.  But it's caused to me to think about my philosophy towards family meals.  Meals are about so much more than just nutrition and I think it's easy to forget that, including me.



Here are my goals for family meals:

1.  Help my children learn how to cook and prepare a meal.
2.  Serve nutritious food to my family--but if they won't eat it, it's not going to be do them any good.
Which brings me to...
3.  Serve food that is enjoyable to eat.  Let go of the guilt involved with less-healthy food and serve them in moderation.
4.  Have a loving and safe atmosphere as we eat.
5.  Have an interesting conversation that everyone can participate in.
6.  Teach my children how to help clean up after a meal.

Have we achieved all my goals for our meals?  No, not even close.  As always, we are a work in progress. But as a result of thinking about these goals, I have decided to stop correcting my children at the dinner table, if at all possible.  Sometimes their manners (or lack thereof) make me crazy.  But I'm going to try to stop correcting as much as possible.  It's going to be a challenge for me.


As far as conversation goes, that is also something we're working on.  I downloaded a bunch of conversation starters/questions but I can't say we've used it a lot.  Sometimes I don't like it the silliness that sometimes results, but there's a teaching opportunity, right?

I'm thankful to my mother for providing a good example to me in her family meals.  She excelled at providing three meals a day for her large family even if she didn't have as much money to spend at the grocery store as she wanted.  We generally liked the food she prepared and it was generally nutritious.  Conversation was not always the greatest but just about every night the family gathered and had dinner together.  I didn't realize how rare this was until I started talking to friends whose mothers rarely cooked dinner.

So I'll keep trying to have family dinners and other meals where my children leave the table feeling loved.

 

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