Dinner Hour
by
Jeff Stimpson © 2006
Jill gave me a child-rearing book, Blessings of
a Skinned Knee, which, among other tips of real sense, advises
that dinner hour is sacred.
I looked across the living room. Alex munching
chicken nuggets by hand and Ned absently spooning in white rice as
he watched Toy Story, his spillage mounting like a snow bank
at his feet, didn't spell "sacred."
So we inaugurated the Stimpson Family Dinner Hour.
Most families have one. Kramer on "Seinfeld" said so. "And do you
know what happens over dinner?" Kramer said. "You talk about your
day! 'How was your day today? Did you have a good day or a bad day
today? And how was your day today?'"
Jerry, stunned: "I'm glad we had this talk."
Kramer, agitated: "Oh, you have no idea!"
Ned will eat most of what we eat, more or less:
spaghetti, roast chicken, broccoli, spinach and peas. He loves
potatoes and rice, and may be moving into childhood's renowned
"white phase" at the table. "TA-toe," coos Ned. Both boys will eat
chicken and fries from numerous cheap spots around our neighborhood.
The Chinese hole-in-the-wall around the corner serves a lo mien so
good I swear they put opium in it. Whatever Ned doesn't eat of that
is gone in a few seconds.
Alex will eat the chicken from the lo mien, but in
general he would still have to loosen up a lot at the table to even
qualify as "picky." 'Whatever fires in our heads regarding good and
new foods hasn't yet fired completely in his, and his eating is
still kind of parked at chicken nuggets and crunchy stuff like
pretzels. Kind of, though in the past year Alex has taken many steps
toward eating like a Manhattanite and started to accept yogurt (the
expensive stuff), ice cream (Mister Softee), and pizza (preferably
in the restaurant). Both boys can each now take care most of the
toasted cheese off a full slice, which is heartening. "Jeez, that
sounds pretty good," more than one nutritionist has said of Alex's
eating.
But dinner at the table has as much to do with
sculpting behavior as it does with diet. The dinner hour campaign
goes hand in hand with my new Skinned Knee-inspired parenting
energy, which the other day included an honest-to-dad memo to Jill.
"I think we should start doing the following things with the boys
immediately," I e-mailed her. "1. Make the boys wipe up their own
spills. No exceptions! 2. Make the boys use the hand-broom and
dustpan to sweep up their own crumbs. No exceptions! 3. Make the
boys take their own dishes into the kitchen after dinner. NO
EXCEPTIONS!" Skinned Knee stipulates that everybody should do
these chores, as well as have an assigned seat at the dinner table,
though it doesn't say so in capital letters.
Ned has been eating at the kiddie table for a long
time (see "snow bank"), but for an embarrassing number of months
Alex has slipped through our parental net and chowed down on nuggets
in front of the TV. Even though he's shown sparks of wanting to eat
at the table -- he took the Chinese beef off the plates of dinner
guests about six months ago, and usually hangs around munching his
pretzels when grandma and grandpa come to dinner -- I knew I
couldn't simply staple a special-needs 5-year-old into his assigned
dinner seat and open fire with peas and broccoli.
One night I coaxed him to the kiddie table and sat
down with him over some baked ravioli. Pizza, I'd been assured,
could be the gateway to pasta. "I think Alex wants more and more to
eat with someone," I told Jill the night before. I gave him a fork
and took a fork myself, and I nibbled. I cut his single ravioli
square into four pieces and mine into six, to make mine last longer.
I speared one of his quarters and held it up for him. He took the
fork, gently removed the ravioli with his fingers, and held it to
his lips. Touching the lips with many foods is Alex's way of
convincing himself he's an adventurous eater, I think. Most of them
he passes back. There is almost never any pile of food at Alex's
feet.
Then he nibbled. Alex ate ravioli!
He ate it the next night, too. Time for the
grown-ups' table.
I'd sure like to get this dinner-hour thing down
soon. The boys' bouncing around at Passover caused a terrible row,
and now more holidays loom. Ned we can kind of count on, especially
if there's something white to eat. Alex is tougher, and to special
family dinners I plan to bring an emergency kit of favorite toys,
scented candles (his old EI special-ed. teacher has pointed out that
unusual smells sometimes calm autistic kids), and the Doomsday
Machine of Mutually Assured Peacefulness with Alex at dinner: Cheese
Doodles.
But still, it'd be nice if we had something
approaching a normal meal.
Skinned Knee, the
parenting book Jill lent me, stresses that sharing food is a sacred
part of family life (the book talks specifically about Jewish family
life and the importance to it of sharing food; I come from more a
pioneer-in-a-blizzard heritage, where everybody hoards what they
have: this could explain past friction when Jill always asked for a
piece of my pie...). The book also says that children should not
only be taught to respectfully break the McNugget, but even respect
the seating arrangements.
At our dinners, I take an end seat -- a position
of authority I think has more to do with tradition in other families
than personal charisma on my part -- and Jill sits on my left. Alex
sits on her left, and Ned sits on my right. The chair to Ned's right
is empty, because if anybody sat there they'd kick over the stack of
books Jill has been meaning to take to the Salvation Army.
"How was school today, Alex?"
Alex doesn't answer much, and he particularly
doesn't answer much when not 15 minutes before he discovered the
bread-making machine in the kitchen corner. Tonight Jill has made
Chinese beef and peppers with white rice. We've discussed what Ned
thinks of rice, and bear in mind that it was Chinese beef that Alex
swiped from those guests' plates weeks ago. So we're hopeful.
"Did you have a good day today, Ned?" I asked.
(Jerry, stunned: "I'm glad we had this
talk...")
"Oh good day, yeah," he said, I guess. But his
next words are quite clear: "More rice, please!"
We give him some. He holds a handful in front of
my nose and says, "Here, daddy." Alex is screeching in front of the
TV, aghast that Wee Sing Train has actually been darkened for
family dinner time. I get up and bring him back. Jill has placed
little cuts of beef on each boy's plastic flower plate. Each boy
also has a fork; Ned uses his with growing skill (tonight's snow
pile is small), and Alex will often eat things off a utensil that he
wouldn't like to touch, which makes sense. Once he ate a mean off
the plastic head of a toy chicken, which doesn't make sense. "That
is, I admit, crazy," said Jill.) Alex should by all rights eat some
bread tonight, judging from how he's been incessantly fiddling with
Jill's bread machine in the corner of our kitchen.
"Alex, we sit down to eat dinner!" We do now,
anyway.
"Okay all right okay," he says. He tries to sail
around my end of the table and toward the kitchen like a linebacker
dodging a block to get to the quarterback. I snag him.
"Back to the table, Alex."
"More rice, please!" Ned says.
I seat Alex while Jill scoops out more rice for
Ned to handle. Alex picks up the beef and places it on his closed
lips, which he seems to believe is as good as eating. He places it
back on the plate and bolts, this time slipping past me into the
kitchen and crying, "Chicken!"
"Make him the damned nuggets," Jill says. "Pick up
your rice, Ned."
"Rice. Oh yeah. Rice."
The damned nuggets take 15 minutes, so in the
meanwhile I ask Alex if he'd like something else. He gets a bowl out
of the drawer and looks at the cabinet above the fridge. "You want a
few pretzels, Alex?" He stares at the cabinet out of the corner of
his eye, appears sheepish and indecisive, then bolts for the broom
closet on the other side of the room.
"Cheez Doodles!"
No way, Alex. What do you think this is,
Thanksgiving?
"Alex, you can have some pretzels."
"Cheese Nips."
"You can have some Cheerios," I say.
"Pretzels," he says softly. "Pretzels please
daddy."
I shovel some out. "You have to eat them at the
table with us, Alex," I say. "At the big table."
"Okay all right."
He sits. I eat my cool Chinese food and see that
Ned is on his tummy across the empty chair to his right, slapping at
the stack of books and I guess hoping that its collapse will take
our mind off the rice that has to be swept up at the base of his
chair. Actually Ned's getting better about learning how to sweep.
So's Alex, which is good because when the timer goes ding and
his chicken is done, he bolts from the big table back toward the TV.
We've been eating for 15 minutes.
Copyright 2005 Jeff Stimpson, all rights reserved
