My son is only in kindergarten, and most nights it feels legit impossible to fit everything in between the hours of 6 and 8pm. We’ve got to do homework (yes, he has it at 5 years old), bath, snack, book time, toothbrushing and oh yes ― dinner.
Dinner is the worst. Not only is my son in a phase where he is exclusively interested in eating hot dogs, he consumes his food at the pace of a tortoise without all the winning the race stuff at the end.
That’s why I relate so hard to the latest Facebook post from Bunmi Laditan, the mom behind Honest Toddler and the author of Toddlers Are A**holes: It’s Not Your Fault.
”I’m tired of dinner,” she writes. “It is absolutely insane that every night, mothers and fathers are forced to waste their life force trying to convince their seed to CONTINUE LIVING via the ingestion of essential nutrients.”
She continues to break it all the way down about the “ultimate bullshit” that is dinner time.
“I‘m sick of it. I’m sick of cooking food 1/3 or 2/3 or 0/3 of them like and watching them look at their plates of pan-seared chicken thighs with roasted potatoes and baby corn like it’s a pile of duck tongues served with on a bed of infant baby fingers garnished with dirty toenail clippings, backwash and leprosy. It’s not poison, kids, it’s called FOOD welcome to life.”
And Laditan doesn’t mention it, but I’m also sick of saying “Eat. Eat. Eat.” over and over again throughout dinner like I’m a record stuck in a groove and still not inspiring my kid to put any actual food in his mouth.
Concluding that “we can’t live like this anymore,” Laditan suggests we come together as parents and feed our children at giant picnic tables in the street.
She writes, “Screw traffic- every night at 6PM, we set up the collapsible tables and do it orphanage-style: handing out sandwiches and apple slices and then hosing down the kids with dish soap (bath time) and calling it a night. Success.”
I, for one, am in.
