Kitchen Closes, 7pm!

Behold: The Kimmel Family Dinner

This is the third post in my series on why meals stink when you are a parent. See here for breakfast and lunch.

This happens about four nights every week – Andrea and I look up from what we are doing around 6pm and say to one another “What the heck are we doing for dinner?” The fifth night we’ve usually already planned to eat pizza.

The result is exactly what you might imagine. We have several, simple-to-prepare meals that we lean on heavily. We eat microwaveable food. We eat leftovers. We snack instead of dinner. Some nights are known as “every man for himself,” where all of the above are options.

The biggest problem with dinner is that it takes pre-planning. Meat has to be thawed. Ingredients have to be purchased. Veggies need to be chopped. The slow-cooker needs to be turned on. The disgusting, half-eaten, goopy cucumber in the veggie drawer has to be thrown away and replaced by another half-eaten one that can be left to rot properly.

To Andrea’s great credit, she does plan a couple of meals a week and get the necessary prep work done. I have no idea how she manages this, because most evenings all I have the strength to plan for is a bag of Skittles. The problem with the pre-planning is you never want what you planned for. Our “future” selves always want light and healthy faire - Lots of veggies and salads. Our “current” selves are too darn hungry and tired to be bothered with all that. Just give us another ham and cheese Hot Pocket, please!

There are bonus nights when the kids will eat the same thing as the adults. But usually we are making not one, but three meals on the fly. Soup for the adults, mac and cheese for Cody and pepperoni with crackers for Chiara is a possible combination. The experts and grandparents say “make them at least try the grown-up dish” and we do that… sometimes. Usually the result is that we end up making mac and cheese while the grown-up dish goes cold.  

We insist on at least some vegetables, with post-dinner sweets as the bribe. The kids, who could apparently subsist on nothing but chicken nuggets (Cody) and buttered noodles (Chiara), will have almost nothing to do with veggies. They each have one, and only one, vegetable which they will tolerate. For Cody, it’s raw baby carrots with a hefty amount of ranch dressing; for Chiara, it’s broccoli. We go through Costco quantities of broccoli and baby carrots. By “go through,” I don’t necessarily mean “eat;” the kids resist even the few pieces of each we put on the plate, and admittedly some nights the vegetable consumption that justifies the candy can be measured on the molecular level.

We have a chalkboard in the kitchen where Andrea has written “Kitchen Closes, 7pm!” It’s written in jest, but the joke is mostly on us. Chiara is always last to start a meal – there are baby dolls to be put to bed, after all – and she is slowest to eat. She’s routinely barely getting warmed up by 7pm, much less ready to allow the kitchen to close. The other part of the joke is that what little we manage to get into the kids at dinner time is often not filling enough. About the time bedtime rolls around they need something else to eat – which is a leading contributor to the rapid decline of their parents’ mental health.

One thing I am proud of is that we have eradicated TV watching from dinner. Andrea and I are not averse to TV in general – the kids have very structured, TV-free days so a little couch time in the evening is okay as far as we are concerned. But TV and meals are contradictory. The kids stare at the TV gape-jawed and don’t move a muscle towards lifting their spoons. I do sometimes think I could slide a feeding tube down Chiara’s throat during those rare TV-meal occasions. That might be one way to get her to eat the grown-up meal and her three broccoli sprigs.

At the end of every dinner is clean-up, which is a structured, proceduralized process in the Kimmel household. Parts of the process might not be otherwise necessary but there is nary a meal without a mess - the kids are totally incapable of eating without making one. Spills, too, are frequent. So the vacuum cleaner, Windex and paper towels are only an arms-reach away at every meal. You don’t want to be frustrated by a spill, you really don’t. They’re kids, after all. But, darn it, the spills are so preventable that they are enough to send you into a “fugue state” as follows:

Child: “Sorry I spilled my milk again. It was an accident”

Parent, sputtering: “Well, yeah it was an accident… But we told you not to leave your spoon… It’s the same as last… BWAAARRRR!” (Fugue state ensues)

Our diet is not what it should be. We eat too many processed foods and nowhere near enough fresh fruits and vegetables. We top it off with sweets and alcohol and pizza. But Geez, we are busy, stressed people with small children. Someday, the kids will be older and we’ll be less busy and stressed, and we will eat a lot healthier. Or at least our future selves will.