As a family with 6 boys in rural Ohio, we had so many amusing things happen I had to record them. This is the 14th in the series.
Six-Hour Meals
It’s a fact that you should try to all sit down together for one meal a day, but with 6 kids in 6 activities after school, it turned into a long, long meal between 3 and 9. In rural Ohio, the school system divided the sports venues among several small villages, which meant I would take one boy to wrestling in town A, one to basketball in town B, one to Karate in town C, then race back home to serve nuked plates of food in between trips.
That great spaghetti at 3:00 was okay at 5, edible at 7 and glue by 9. Sunday meals were somewhat more civilized: there was no food flipping, fork stabbing, burping contests or laughing with cottage cheese in their mouths. And they never said “Yuck I don’t like that” or they would get another helping. That misfired once: Adam meant he couldn’t keep peas down …. as we all discovered. If they didn’t like something, they would gingerly pull the food off their fork with their teeth.. no way would they let their lips touch something yuck. The dog hovered furtively under the table to catch all those vegetables. How did they ever get her to eat sauerkraut?