Tag Archives: dinner time

Milestones

We reached a major milestone in our family today.

It wasn’t one of those big ones they tell you about in baby books, nothing involving potty training or lost teeth. It wasn’t even one of those that parents dream of together while talking at the edges of playgrounds.  Nothing like being able to buckle their own car seats and pour themselves cereal on a Saturday morning.

No, today, officially, all of our children can cut up their own pork chop.

Pork chop cutting is nothing like pancake cubing, or carrot slicing or even chicken chunking. No, pork chop cutting is hard. It requires a sharp knife and use of a fork at the same time, combine that with a meat that isn’t known as the most tender of dishes, and inevitably they make the terrible silverware on a plate screech.

 

Pork chop cutting is, in the words of my nephew, the worstest.

I loath pork chop cutting so much that I stopped buying, making and cooking pork chops. When John insisted I was being ridiculous, I said that was fine, if he made them he could also cut them. ALL of them. Because, there was a time in the house that if you were going to make pork chops you would have to cut up three other peoples’ pork chops in addition to your own. And you can’t just cut them into man sized hunks but r

 

ather into tiny, little, chew-able, girl, tidbits.

In addition, anyone with kids who isn’t some sort of super mom (the variety who gets all the required food, accouterments and drinks to the table before they sit down) knows that a mom doesn’t simply sit at the table, cut up pork chops and eat.

Oh no.

There are water spills to manage, bbq sauce to retrieve, the last pot of beans that you forgot to get, a cat to lock up, a dog to let out to pee, a kid to send to the bathroom and – oh look. You’ve only cut up one and half pork chops and the other cat is busy dragging yours out the door because you weren’t looking. But it’s fine because it’s cold and hard now and you can’t actually imagine risking more of that screeching noise to cut up another one anyway

And that is why I banned pork chops.

 

Tonight John made pork loin, which I am well aware is just a sneaky way of getting around the no pork chop rule. But tonight all the girls cut up their pork by themselves. They didn’t even ask for anything more than to pass the knife.

Pork chops are back on the menu!

Did I Just Say What I Thought I Said? XIV

It’s the fourteenth edition of “Did I Just Say What I Thought I Said?” in which I share phrases that I never thought:
 
A) Would ever need to be said in the first place,
B) that I would need to be the one to say them and
C) that I wouldn’t just be saying them, I’d be yelling them.
 

Today’s ridiculous, ineffective and only partially true edict?

There is NO furniture rearranging during dinner!!!

Yup, ridiculous, ineffective and untrue, obviously someone had been rearranging furniture.

Yet, these are the kinds of crazy things that come out of my mouth when the six year old shoves the seven foot long bench at the table down so that the four year old can’t reach her plate. But why, you ask, can’t the four year old reach her plate? Well, that’s because the bench was moved and so her plate was now nine inches to her right. This was an issue because, for the first time in her short life, instead of standing or bouncing or wandering while eating her dinner, she decided to glue her butt to the bench as she’s been repeatedly told. Also, apparently, she has alligator arms that are too short to reach nine inches and move her plate in front of her and her older sister knew it so that’s why she was smirking sitting on the end of the bench with no table in front of her.  So I, from the kitchen, hands covered in dough yelled about furniture rearranging and was met with blank stares – deservedly.

Then I threatened to cancel dessert.

The bench slid back into place and dinner resumed.

There may be people who can parent without the occasionally ridiculous decree- but I’m not one of them. And, you know, by this point, if things like this didn’t occasionally fly out of my mouth I’d probably wonder if I was still a parent.