Dinner

I can remember the meals we ate when I was growing up, the casseroles and salads and homemade tortillas.  I remember discovering foods that I hated, like liver and cooked carrots, and foods that I loved, like tacos and ham and chicken divan.  I ate a pretty healthy, balanced diet, because other people were in charge of what was on my plate.

Then I went to college.  In those early years of independence, I found new foods that I loved, like Tony's microwaveable pizza and Ramen noodles.  I ordered hot wings with bleu cheese for a special treat, and I dunked Oreo cookies into peanut butter while I watched old episodes of SNL.  Little changed when I moved on to sparsely furnished apartments shared with six other people, and I ate my canned soup from the pan standing over the barely-used stove.  I made oatmeal for breakfast with a coffee maker and carried a can of Pringles in my bag when I went to work.  I bought a loaf of bread occasionally, but it would always get moldy before I was able to finish it.

When I got married, my husband made fun of my weird, prepackaged meals, and we cooked together at home as often as we went out to restaurants after work.  Dinner was so fun, after years of solitude, to have another person to talk to about the day and whatever else floated into my mind.  We had so much fun inviting friends over to our tiny apartment and meeting up with people at 11pm.  It was a time of bliss, because we had no way of knowing how short it would be, how a new little person would be joining us after only two years.  We had no idea that money would get tight, because we didn't know that we would drop down to one income.  We'd heard words like budget and savings, and they sounded very grownup and serious, but we really didn't know what they meant or how to stop spending so freely.  Honestly, we're still trying to figure that one out three kids later.

Pregnancy messed with dinner, since I never knew if I was going to be ravenous or nauseous, and I returned to my soup-in-the-pan dinners when my husband was at work late, often eating a few biscuits and large serving of mashed potatoes.  But when he was home, it was steak (because babies need red meat) and kale salads (because babies also need their mothers to be miserable) and midnight runs to Taco Bell.

Dinner with babies or toddlers is like this whole other thing, because somebody is running around, whether it is the parents or the kids, and nobody gets to eat their food when it is the correct temperature or even in one sitting.  I developed some bad eating habits, in addition to the others I'd picked up throughout my adult years, and eating was almost never healthy or nutritious.

But life has settled for us in many ways.  The kids will sit for at least five minutes of a family dinner, and we're getting back to the cooking that we liked so much ten years ago.  There are no more midnight meal runs or desperate trips to Wendy's.  We grow herbs and fruit and vegetables in our yard, and I've even learned how to buy groceries better, so I'm prepared to eat something that will actually nourish me when meal time comes around.  (And it keeps coming, like, three times a day.  Every day.  So weird.)

You might notice that I don't share recipes or post meal plans or even workout videos.  I'm on this path to making better choices for myself and my family, but I have no idea if what works for us will work for anyone else.  Neither my husband or myself is repeating exactly what our parents did when we were growing up; we've tailored what we do to fit our people and our tastes.  And, as I've learned over the years, those tastes are evolving and changing all the time.