Day 11: an unexpected discovery

Meals are complicated at my house. We do not sit down to family dinners; we are hardly ever on the same schedule. I wish I had this idyllic family meal time, and I have a very large suitcase of guilt about it (see? it's so bulky sitting next to me.).

If you want to read about family meals and training your children to not be picky eaters, you will have to read a different blog. I wish you the best.

Okay, are they gone? The judgmental people who don't approve of me? So it's just us now, and we're okay with my real life?

My oldest two children feed themselves. My elder child even shops for herself, and the middle daughter is very loud about what she wants, what she needs help with, why don't we have blah on hand, etc. My youngest, the introvert in the chaos of our household, just quietly doesn't eat sometimes.

The other day I asked her if she had had breakfast. No, she had not. Would she like oatmeal? Yes, that would be good. "I'll make it for you!" I announced. "Mom of the year!" She tilted her pretty head and said, sarcastically, "Mom of the year? Because you're feeding your child?"

So it is with three, chaotic teenage daughters that I am working through the pantry and freezer. My youngest loved the cornmeal pancakes; none of them touched the spaghetti sauce I made last night from a cache of frozen romas. My middle daughter has made it her mission to clean up the taco shells, which also uses fresh tomatoes (the garden is now yielding an abundance). We still, like all humans, connect over food. Things just don't look standard here.

And in all of this reorganizing, I made an important observation: I need to cook for my youngest every day. I go on binges of cooking for her sometimes, but I need to set aside time daily to cook for her. I honestly could not see how to do this before now, before this month of "eat what we have." She and I inventoried what she likes, what I have on hand, and I now have a goal for the coming school year.

When I started this project, it was not with the intention of being more organized going forward. I did not expect to gain insight into how we eat. But it's as if food is such a central thing, it is pulling our entire home towards a better future.

I wish for all of you enough of a pause in the hustle and bustle that you can make some useful discoveries. Maybe it's how to creatively cook a bag of frozen peas or incorporate three cans of something you found in the back shelf. Or maybe you'll see a family dynamic in a fresh way, and find a way forward that is satisfying to your soul.