Starting Again + Dinnertime Woes

A couple weeks on a fast from Facebook and BOOM! Once again, I feel the urge to blog. Though the one-sided conversations in my head were never really tamed by Facebook, status posts did momentarily satisfy my need to share with the world. And unlike on my old blog, fb people quite often respond with comments of their own. Well, how very gratifying!

So, here’s a new twist: I’ll see if I can be active on fb and blog at the same time. Facebook to give me the social interaction I sorely miss, living out here in my isolated rural splendor… and blogging as a way to offload – um, I mean communicate – the thoughts I have that are over the heads of the two little girls who share my days.


Since food and gratitude continue to dominate my existence, I think the old Recipes for Abundance blog title can be kept. Even so, there will likely be fewer recipes and more stories/musings on parenting, partnering and living intentionally. I may throw in a few poems when the inspiration strikes.


**For those of you reading this who put the bug in my ear about restarting the blog, I owe you a big thank you for the encouragement. Even if you were just trying to get me to blab less and write more, I appreciate the nudge.**

I’ll leave you today with something from a book I’ve been reading lately, and the promise/warning of more reflections on this topic to come. The book is called The Hour that Matters Most: The Surprising Power of the Family Meal, by Les and Leslie Parrott. It’s full of lots of useful psychological study factoids, cute anecdotes and parenting tips, but this simple quote is what got my attention the other day:

“Better a dry crust eaten in peace than a house filled with feasting – and conflict.” Proverbs 17:1

Whoa there. I don’t know about how meals go at your house, but eating as a family at our house is often full of tension. Most days, I definitely prefer the time I spend preparing our tasty/all-food-groups-represented meals to the half hour we share at the dinner table, where Stephen and I grimly police the eating behaviors of two squirrely children. This is something I hope to change, but am struggling as to how to do it.

One (childless) friend recommends hiding the kids’ food in the backyard and making them search for it when they get hungry, an option I’m definitely going to exercise in the summer months. But for now they sit at table, bawling with unchewed food spilling from their open mouths, their seats and the floor below them covered in crumbs, their full water glasses knocked over onto the tablecloth. Calgon, take me away… if you have any strategies that make for a more enjoyable dinner time, fire away.