Every now and then it’s good to shake it up a little and do something out of the ordinary with your family meal.
Not everyone can eat together all of the time but there is a body of research linking eating together as a family with reduced rates of lots of ‘antisocial’ behaviours. Lots of experts recommend making the effort to eat together at least three or four times a week.
In our family we almost always eat together and generally we sit down at a table so that we can interact and have a bit of a discussion about the day. But tonight we did things a little bit differently.
We ask that kids to all shower and put on some clothes as if we were going out somewhere and and then to occupy themselves upstairs for half an hour. During that time we set up our dining room like a mid-level restaurant. We put a tablecloth on the table for once, lit a few candles and even printed some simple black-and-white menus.
We didn’t have time to make more than one meal so really the only choice on the menu was between three or four types of drink. Then at the allotted time we invited the children to come down and one by one we seated them at the table as would happen in a restaurant. By now they were pretty intrigued and they were even more excited when we began to take their drinks orders.
We dressed in black shirts and threw a tea towel over our arms to do our best waiter and waitress impersonations. We then went through a meal of garlic bread and pizzas and whenever had their mains we sat down and ate with the kids. At the end of the meal we showed them how to place the cutlery on their plates to indicate they’d finished and we serve some desert.
This was a really fun night and the kids all had a great time … Best of all cost us nothing! So give it a go sometime to make mealtimes a bit of fun and enjoy each other’s company dining out at home 🙂
