apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I like the appetizer tray idea. My mom used to always do this for us when she was little. It was always something like baby carrots with something to dip them in, or pretzels and little cubes of cheese. It kept us from being ravenous and annoying and was an easy way for her to introduce new and different fuits/veggies/cheeses/breads into our diet without it being an "Eat it all or you're not getting up from the table" situation :)

Eating dinner together nightly correlates strongly with higher performance in school and fewer discipline problems. Even if your dinner isn't homemade, it's easy enough to gather at the table to eat together. When my husband was a teenager it was understood that he and his siblings could not go out until after dinner...and they never had a problem with that. They were totally used to it and, in fact, often had friends join them who never experienced it at home and liked having the parental attention.

While we eat together every night, I wanted to avoid what I remembered from childhood, my mother's stress at getting a dinner on the table by 6 when we were all exhausted, especially her. Since my daughter is still going to bed at 7:30, we eat appetizers while she eats at 6:30 and then prepare our adult dinner after she goes to bed. Weekends are a time when we all prepare and eat the whole meal together, but on weeknights we love our split dinners. Still get the lovely family time, just a mellower version of the evening meal.