So, I started having planned family dinner discussions. It started out by reading from a saint book. Each of us (well the ones that could read) would read a saint of the night. I also brain teasers from a book that I had from teaching. We quickly went through these and started to fall back into the old habit of just eating and quickly getting away from family time. I feel that dinner is a great opportunity for us to sit down, relax, and reconnect. We are often so busy, that this is truly the only time that all six of us are together and we can put our attention on only the family.
We've got a unique family situation. Two of our kids are in middle school and two are in diapers! It definitely makes dinner different. Before the little ones came along our dinner conversations revolved around the two school age kids...what was their day like, who did they eat lunch with, what was exciting, etc. Once the little ones came along, dinner began to revolve around them. Making sure they were eating their food and not throwing it on the floor, laughing at their silly expressions, and trying to stop the crying from the baby. The older two kids started to hurry through dinner just to get away. I realized that our attention wasn't on the family as a whole, just the littler kids.
I found a great blog (How Does She) that had a bunch of conversation questions for family dinner. Since we'd gone through what I already had, I decided to print these off and add these to our nightly ritual, there's over 100 questions! I cut them up into pieces, added them to a Mason jar, and now it's the highlight of dinner time. Some of the questions are trivia and some are more of the what would you do type. So if you're in a similar situation as us and need something to help make family dinner time more "family", check out the questions.
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