Eating a family meal together- tell this idiot how it works.....

[fustilarian]

Ok am I being really thick here?

This eating together as a family thing- do your children go to bed really late, or do you and DH eat dinner at 5pm?

I really want us all to eat together but can't figure out how (apart from breakfast). Do I just have to wait til LO is a teenager?

Am I missing the bleeding obvious?

Yes just about Jackie, though that's about all we do intimately a deux at the moment, so perhaps I am seriously misusing the evenings.....

We always eat all our meals together, however DH works funny hours. Three days a week we all have lunch together, the rest we all have dinner together. I eat with the children when DH isn't home- he has dinner/lunch at work.

We eat dinner between 5:30 and 6pm.My children are young- 3 and 19 months.

Good idea Piggysneed, will do just that, or failing ice cream, butternut squash puree would surely do the trick...

We have always eaten together between 6 and 7; the kids have never gone to bed earlier than 7.30 (currently 8.30). If I am at a late night lecture, dh will eat with the children and I'll heat up the leftovers later.

DP gets home between 5:30-6:30, I tend to have dinner on when he comes in (Except for this week, I've been lazy as it's half-term).
We eat about 6:30 every day, at the table together.
DD is 7, DS1 is 3, Ds2 will just fit in when he gets old enough to eat (he is 7weeks).
After dinner the DC's are straight in the bath, ready for bed and then they have milk and biscuits and go to bed by 8pm.

Very random over here. Dh gets home 6.20-7. We sometimes eat together at 6.30 but often dd eats before 6 while I cook dinner. She doesn't like our dinners - that's a work in progress - so I make hers then I make ours (she's nearly 3). Then bed 8 pm.

I like the idea of eating together but the timing and organisation tend to defeat me.

I don't understand that Acinoyx, the timing thing, surely its easier to cook one meal at the same time than two?

We only eat together at weekends as DP doesn't get home any earlier than 7.30 so too late for DC's - i sit with them and have a coffee and chat with them while they eat

I eat later with DP or have a snack on my own if he's working late

Acinonyx i cook seperate meals for the DC and for dp and me too because tbh i don't always want to eat what they do and vice versa, plus i'm veggie and i do try and get enough meat into their diet as i can but not wanting to eat it myself - although at weekends i cook either a veggie meal for us all or something that can be easily adapted for us all - it works fine for us!

dh and i always have evening meal together on a saturday. i think its i important to have time together and also to ahve something to look forward to every week (god that sounds really sad, doesnt it)

apart from that we all eat together at 6pm

mine are 5 and 3 now - so dont need fed and can get their own drinks and cutlery

We eat breakfast together (minus DH as he doesn't eat breakfast except at weekends) lunch is often at the table but depends what we are eating.... if it's just a sandwich and they are playing happily in the garden then I don't see the point of traipsing to the table!

Dinner is all four of us probably 6 nights out of 7. We have to eat earlier than we used to in order to do this though. We all eat around 5.30 / 6 pm. Monday and Tuesday we both work and dd and ds are in nursery so we tend to eat around 6pm and then they are in bed at 7pm. It can be rather frantic but it is well worth it in my own experience so far.

DD is 3 and DS is 1 by the way.

Fustilarian, we have tiny too, and at 5 or 6pm we all sit at the table - dd eats supper but DH and I just have a cup of tea and have ours once she's in bed.

We only tend to eat together at the weekend as dh doesn't get in from work until 6.30pm at the earlist.

So what i do is I eat with lunch with dd's and at dinnertime i have a cup of tea while dd's have their dinner.

Breakfast dd's tend to theirs at the table while i rush around like a madthing getting things ready to walk to school and getting dh up while eating mine on the go.

ours eat at 5-ish, at the kitchen table
I sit with them with tea or bustle about in the kitchen
dh and I eat togetehr later once they are in bed

occassionally we all eat at 6-ish
always eat weekend lunches together

i do that too - if im not eating at same time as dd's i will sit with them and have a cuppae

otherwise they end up feeding it to the cat or pinging it across the room at each other

During the week we start dinner sometime between 7pm and 8pm.

When my stepsons are here, all five of us always eat together and we tend to eat a little earlier (nearer 7 than 8) and have more child-friendly menus.

When it's just the three of us, my daughter often eats beforehand and then has pudding only with us.

At the weekend we always eat all together.

Yesterday lunchtime everyone came home for lunch and the five of us ate together.

When our two were little Dh was commuting 50 miles round the M25, so he usually only got back for bedtime & not always that, so our family meals were only at weekends.

Now they are teenagers we all tend to do our own thing for meals, but we still try to have our roast together on Sunday - always in the evening though as DD has a Sunday job.

Ds1 only 2 years, but we don't eat with him, except occasionally at weekends.

He likes to eat lunch at 11.30, and dinner at 5.30, and I don't.

I always sit with him at the table, have a cup of tea, and chat about the day. Always have breakfast together.

I eat with dh in the evening, if he is around, and I think that is really important. It is so nice to have a bit of civilised adult time.

thanks Muffin - was beginning to think that I was in a minority of one. I don't get home until 6.45 and DH generally gets home at 8.15 -8.45, so DS has dinner before I get home. Generally around 5pm. We have lunch together on weekends, but not dinner, although I usually have a token snack during the "sitting and talking" part.

Sparkles - that's the problem here. Dd usually won't eat what we are having and vice versa. She abhors foods which are all mixed up - and all our dinners are a pot of something (often very spicy) with rice/pasta/potato.

I have marvellous intentions of making more dd friendly portions of our dinners to be put out longside more acceptable fare whether she eats it or not, in the hope that one day we might all eat the same meals.

Thinking of the organisation that involves - you can imagine how successful I have been with that plan.

DC (5 and 1.5) eat at around 6:30 with as many parents as have made it home by then.

If they are very tired and/or we are very disorganised they sometimes eat without us - weekends we all eat later (7:30 ish)

Mornings are a scramble and DC are at school/nursery for lunch, so if we didn't eat together in the evening we never would.

We have breakfast together. We have lunch with DD2, DD1 has hers at nursery. They eat supper at 6.30 and I sit with them and maybe have a little bit too. We eat anytime after theyve gone to bed.

I really worried about this for ages. My dh is disabled and his bodyclock tends to erratic, so we often don't have meals together...if he's been up half the night, he might sleep a lot of the day and then want breakfast at 3 in the afternoon, iyswim. And, I really feel that I deserve one meal a day were I'm not doing as onepieceoflollipop says, and getting up and down and wiping and generally not relaxing.

So, I decided to take a deep breath and stop worrying about it. What I do try to make sure is that whenever possible we sit with ds while he eats, and p'raps once a week get the table out and have proper sit down meal. Also try to make sure the tv is off when we eat, I think that is as important as all sitting round table, all always being together...iyswim.

And I realised from early babyhood that nothing is ever cast in stone, a bit later on, when ds is going to bed later, I will introduce more family/table oriented eating.

We eat late and the DC go to bed late. We have four DC ranging from 6 to 12. DH gets home at 7.20 and we eat (together sitting around a table) at 7.30. DC go to bed at about nine or a bit past on a school night and get up at 7.45 am. As the DC get older, sometimes they have activities, depending on when they'll be home, we either wait and eat even a bit later, or the remaining of us eat together and save a plate for the one with the activity. The DC tend to have a prety sizable snack after school. And thankfully, they are adventurous eaters for the most part and are used to eating decent and varied food.

We do it this way as DH and I feel it's important to eat as a family. When the DC were little and I used to work long hours, we didn't but wish we had.

Well we just ate at 6, then dd went to bed and has just gone to sleep, a bit late for her, but I'm sure there's room for tweaking... and we all ate together, it was great.

DP has gone out though so no intimate ice cream a deux tonight sadly, but I live in hope!