Dinner mayhem

We can't seem to ever get the dinner thing right.

First of all, it's the witching hour, and all hell is usually breaking loose of some sort or another. Everyone's tired, everyone's crabby, everyone's hungry, everyone's desperate for daddy to come home and for the dinner and dishes and laundry and bed time fairy to do all the work (oh wait, that last one is just me....)

Anyway, what usually ends up happening is some iteration of the following, in no particular order:

- Screeching and running throughout the house (one kid, both kids or, I'm not all that ashamed to admit, all three of us).

- Some toy or some dish or something from outside that we really need (a chair, the grill igniter, a tricycle) is broken because Anika or Reni has been 'fixing' it

- Reni's hair is full of mud or they start dumping buckets of sand inside the house or Reni collects dead roaches and brings me handfuls of them with a huge grin and a proclamation that "Look, mama, look what I found! Spiders! Dead spiders!" 

- Skinned knees. Stubbed toes. Scratched arms (that last one usually perpetrated by Anika on her little brother, but his days as victim are numbered and they often go at each other like monkeys, scratching and screeching and slapping and general bang-my-head-against-the-wall goodness).

- Kids run around the dinner table like it's a merry-go-round smorgasbord and I use all forms of cajoling, bribing, and yelling to encourage them to eat. just. one. bite. for. goodness. sake. 

- Me pouring a glass of wine. By myself. Sometimes at 4 p.m.

- Me marveling at the fact that eating something other than a neon-colored fruit snack or goldfish crackers is so difficult for them. I've stopped buying snacks, other than fruit and cheese, and yet the problem persists. As the wonderful and wise Missy told my sister once, she thinks her child survives on atmospheric dust. I wonder the same almost every evening.

Tonight, however, with the promise of swimming and the general feel-good of a day where she received a ridiculously overpriced stuffed cat as reward for being brave during her dentist appointment, Ani sat down at dinner without too much cajoling on my part. She ate some rice, which I expected, and then actually chewed, with a bit of an eewy face, a few pieces of boiled potato. As she was eating her chicken, and after Reni had thrown his rice on the floor and hit her with a ball several times and was serving his sentence in time out, she stopped for a moment and tilted her head.

'Mama,' she asked, 'Is chicken and rice and tomatoes [she often gets potatoes and tomatoes mixed up, and for the record she has NEVER EVER tried a tomato] good for us? 

'Yes.'

'Does eating our food make us big and strong?'

'Yes.'

'Then Reni is going to be SHORT!' she proclaimed with a shout, before wolfing down another bite of chicken.