bringing dinner back

“We didn’t have our family meal yesterday.” — the first sentence out of Noah’s mouth this morning

It’s true. I realized it as we pulled into our friends’ driveway to drop off Sawyer at a birthday sleepover last night.

How it happened is perfectly reasonable and absolutely absent-minded. I make our family calendar (here and on the refrigerator) on Sundays, planning all of our meals based on what we’re doing any given day. Do I have much time to cook right before we eat or does it need to be a quick throw-together or cooked in a crock pot? Will we have leftovers? Is somebody gone, meaning we need to have breakfast or lunch together? Do we have any meals planned with friends? I spend quite some time doing this every Sunday, making the rest of the week easy.

Noah jumps in front of the camera (a new move he thinks is hilarious) at a recent dinner with friends

On Monday of this week, Sawyer gets invited to the birthday party. No worries. Except I never mentally or on paper incorporated this into our calendar. It was a busy work week for me as I started a new freelance project. Thursday night we were all up until past 11 pm watching the UT debacle known as the BCS championship game. Friday morning breakfast was a blur as we let the kids sleep until 7:45 am and had to be out the door by 8:15 am. Everyone had lunch separately, which is almost always the case on weekdays. Another mom picked up Noah at school at 3 pm to take him to rock climbing and he wouldn’t be home until close to 8 pm. We had two other kids staying with us this weekend (they were on the calendar), and Sawyer had the party.

We certainly could’ve had breakfast together Friday. But — regardless the fact that this blog and eating one meal a day together is one of my life’s focuses at the moment — I completely forgot until I was in that driveway. It amazed me how this can still happen. But it happens to families every day. Despite being hyper focused on the idea, it happened to us.

There was nothing to be done. This happened once before when the boys were having a sleepover with friends. I realized it about mid-day, and we just met the family for a quick dinner. No worries. But imagine Sawyer’s face if we all showed up for a family dinner in the middle of a birthday party with he and a dozen other 4th graders. Just not gonna happen.

In actuality, we did have a lovely family dinner last night. Leftover chili, leftover Indian food, raw cookie dough for dessert, a bottle of Riesling. Noah had two friends sleeping over, friends who are as close to family as kids can be without actually giving birth. At first, the boys grabbed their dishes to head off in their own direction. Redirected to the dining room table, though, they lingered, laughing and playing that triangle/golf tee game you see at Cracker Barrel, for more than an hour. It was nice.

It was also nice that Noah mentioned we’d missed our family meal the first thing this morning. He didn’t say it in that snarky pre-teen way. Just noted it, like maybe he missed it, certainly he expected it. And that’s the point here, isn’t it? Creating habits to pass along to the next generation — whether it’s regular, intentional family meal time, expanding our family table to include people from different cultures, or doing our part to make sure everyone in the world has a meal to enjoy every day.

Sure, I screwed up. We’re making up for it today by having two meals together, so in the end, we’ll still have the same number of family meals we set out to have. And I’ll be more vigilent about updating my mental and paper calendars from now on. But Noah’s instant notice of the slip-up actually makes it OK. What we’re doing is working. We are bringing dinner back — today and, hopefully, in 30 years, when Noah is sitting around his dinner table with his family, expecting everyone to be there. And if they aren’t, because sometimes life and a bad memory get in the way, he’ll just try again the next day.