Dinner Struggle

Not my family.

Dinner time is not always a nice time of the day.  More often than not, the children are pretty bad at dinner.  They won't sit down, they run around the table, they fight across the table, they ignore their utensils and eat with their hands.  It tends to be a frustration.  Kent and I have employed a number of different strategies to try and entice the children to actually sit and eat, and most of them have failed miserably.  We have threatened, we have excused them almost before we began, we make them sit at the counter, not at the table, when they won't sit still.  We appointed someone to be a judge and then shared interesting facts, stories, or experiences to see who had the best report.  We regularly have competitions to see who can finish their dinner first, and we have cajoled, pleaded, begged, and nearly screamed while trying to get the children to just eat.  How hard can it be?  Really?

Hard.

Tonight's trick was thought up by Kent.  It was a competition variation.  Brandt and Blythe were up and down and around and around and Kent said, "OK. From this moment on" (when we had been at the table perhaps ten minutes and their dinner was half eaten) "the next person to leave their chair loses.  Let's see who can actually stay in their chair and finish first."  The "first to finish" isn't new, it was the leaving of the chair that was new.  The children launched in--again--and made a bit of progress.  Then Brandt wanted a carrot that was too far for him to reach while in his chair.  So he stood up.  Kent said, "Oh, are you getting out of your chair?"

"I am still touching my chair," replied Brandt.

Kent agreed that was okay, but I immediately realized that "still touching my chair," could get ridiculous.  It isn't super hard to move a chair around and still be touching it.  It took Brandt marginally longer than it took me to realize this, but he got it.  He wanted his pocket knife that was sitting on a table about seven feet away from the kitchen table, so he got up and pulled the chair over, making sure we all understood that he was "still touching his chair."

I was recently asked to speak at BYU's Women's Conference.  I had to decline the invitation because we will be out of town, and that is probably for the best.  I had been asked to speak about making dinnertime a more significant time of the day.  They offered several different avenues of exploration, but quite frankly, the only personal examples I could share would be negative examples of all that doesn't work.  That's all I know.  So far, at our house, we haven't yet figured out dinnertime.