Roses and Thorns
It’s very important to our family that we eat dinner together. I cook about 90% of the time. I enjoy it. It’s not always world-class cuisine, but it’s nice to do for my family. Every Sunday I make a menu for the week, which helps me plan the grocery shopping, and takes the stress of wondering what to make each night.
It’s a family affair: Miss Red now sets the table and CH cleans up.
For years, even before Miss Red was born, we’d ask a certain set of questions:
1. What was your favorite part of the day?
2. What was your least favorite part of the day?
3. What were you most thankful for?
We do this to take the edge of the day and connect. It’s our version of praying. The responses are funny, too. Miss Red vacillates between “I don’t know,” or “this,” or something that happened weeks ago. We take turns answering and it usually puts a smile on the grown-up faces. If for some reason we don’t eat dinner together, CH and I find that we still ask one another before bed.
I remembering reading that the Obamas do something similar, which they call Roses and Thorns. Which basically means we’re a presidential family.
So even though I was crabby yesterday after a challenging day at work, we still asked the questions. I didn’t have a response, but knew that I was looking forward to my yoga class. While short on patience, the questions did help me relax into the dinner I had made – sauteed kale, baked feta topped with capers, tomatoes and basil, and warmed pita. It got me into my food and out of my head. And while I couldn’t handle much of the whining that Miss Red emitted before I whisked off to yoga, I know that when we ask the questions tonight, I will say, “this.”
– MD
ellencarlson
MD
Alyssa
nvcooke
First Smiles And Tears 
We do Hi/Lo – It’s nice, because it gives everyone a chance to name that thing that stunk and then think about the thing that made us smile.
Abbott gets into it – and for awhile, everything he was saying was something that had happened days ago, and we’d all laugh, and say “A-man, that was last week!” So now he ends every hi or lo with a smile and an aside -“was that today?!”
“Was that today?!” Love it. Funny how their little brains work, and it helps me realize that Big Grown-up Concerns can be easily handled.