Can My Wolf-It-Down Family Eat More Slowly, Mindfully?

I had to laugh when I read an article in the New York Times promoting “mindful” eating. In my house, people eat as though bands of marauders are apt to rampage through the kitchen at any moment, stealing all the “good food” from the table (leaving behind the veggies and anything “weird” looking) and leaving my family bereft and hungry.

To say that we are gulp down our food at a rapid clip is as much of an understatement as saying that Donald Trump has a slightly inflated ego.

The Spouse in particularly is guilty of this. He does it so often that I frequently mutter under my breath, “Slow down!” (When I’ve had too much caffeine during the day and/or am on a tight time schedule, he does the same for me.)

So when I told him that the New York Times said he should put down his fork in between bites, as I oftentimes suggest, he accused me of ad libbing. But I wasn’t.

“Try this,” the article began, “place a forkful of food in your mouth. It doesn’t matter what the food is, but make it something you love – let’s say it’s that first nibble from three hot, fragrant, perfectly cooked ravioli.”

“Now comes the hard part,” writer Jeff Gordinier continued. “Put the fork down. This could be a lot more challenging than you imagine, because the first bite was very good and another immediately beckons. You’re hungry.”

Gordinier said if you take the time to chew the food s-l-o-w-l-y, appreciate not just the taste and texture of the food, but its smell and appearance on your plate while remaining silent, you’ll likely enjoy your food more AND eat less in the process.

This made me wonder if in my family, where eating is practically a competitive sport – that’s when The Youngest Boy isn’t talking 447 miles per hour as he scarfs in order to tell us the latest fifth grade boy joke about Uranus and something likely involving balls (it’s a comedy sketch a minute at our dinner table) – this could ever work, even for a single meal.

A lot of factors are against it, one being the fact that dinner is usually sandwiched in between youth sports practices, pending homework assignments, The Spouse having a mere 10 minutes to spare before he has to run out again, etc. Another obstacle is that The Youngest Boy has precious little patience with just sitting there like a civilized being and eating at a thoughtful pace. He's got a lot on his mind and on his super-secret To Do list.

I even wonder if The Spouse and I could achieve “mindful” eating on our own, what with being interrupted every other minute (because the kids haven't seen their dad all day and all want to tell him stuff). I guess it’d have to be while we’re out at a dinner someplace, alone.

Do you think you could get your family to slow down, to put down the fork between bites, and actually enjoy the food? Or is this just some Martha Stewart-esque pipe dream, particularly for the Picket Fence Post family where we go 10 rounds with The Youngest Boy in order to get the kid to eat two carrot sticks?

As for the article’s suggestion that the first part of the meal be consumed in silence . . . yeah, that’s not gonna happen my friend, not in our house.

Image credit: Jennifer May/New York Times

Notes on a Family Vacation, from New England to Orlando

A random collection of observations from last week's trip where two 12-year-olds, a 9-year-old, a mom and a dad jumped on a plane in Providence, Rhode Island bound for Orlando, stayed for a week and visited all manner of amusement parks and a space center just to mix things up a little:

“Feeding our family is difficult.”

That was the astute observation of The Girl. It was also a gross understatement.

Take one mom with a dairy allergy, one 9-year-old insanely picky eater who pitches a nutty if he doesn’t eat something every two hours or so (preferably something with carbs), one 12-year-old boy who gets very distinct notions in his head about what he does and doesn’t want and toss in a trying-too-hard-to-please-everyone-dad and you have the recipe for angst and drama during lunch and dinner times. (We had breakfast at our room each day, so breakfast didn't stress anyone out and I could eat without fearing that I was being poisoned.)

When your eating choices are limited to the crap at amusement parks for most of the week, by Day 6 figuring out what to do for lunch for people with disparate needs becomes a tense proposition. Add to that the fact that I wound up going on an involuntary diet comprised of mostly salads --because they were safer choices for me because they didn't contain dairy -- that yielded one hungry, cranky mom. Made me long for being back at home where I could control the ingredients in my own food.

Key Cards are Cool and Coveted, Apparently

The Picket Fence Post kids still argue over who gets to push the button to call the elevator, press the button for the floor number and who gets to use the hotel key card. Somehow, these things never get old and they never seemed to work it out between the three of them.

Image credit: IMDB.com

Princess Fiona as a Human Princess, Not an Ogre

While we were visiting Universal Studios, The Spouse made his own interesting observation: In nearly all the images of Princess Fiona on the products for sale in the gift shop at the end of the Shrek ride, she was shown in her human form, not as Shrek’s ogre wife. Why?

Red Sox Nation Really is a Nation

The Picket Fence Post family wore Boston Red Sox caps a lot while we were in Florida, a fact that tended to elicit a lot of responses from people, ranging from thumbs up and knowing nods to sarcastic digs:

The wise-cracking Donkey from Shrek, who was posing with the other characters from the film and amusement park-goers, broke out into Boston's “More Than a Feeling” upon hearing that we were from the Boston area and noticing our hats.

A guy running an amusement park game in the Amity section of Universal Studios kept yelling out, “Hey! Boston Red Sox!” every time I saw him. It was cool the first time. After that, it was just awkward.

The manager of a nice hotel restaurant, upon learning that we were from the Boston (as we weren’t wearing our hats in the restaurant), talked our ears off about the Sox and the time he said he used to work for the team. Afterward, we couldn't decide if he'd really worked for them or whether he was just trying to chat up gullible tourists. You never can tell.

One cute-as-button senior citizen employee manning the Men in Black ride at Universal saw our hats and eagerly pulled out his wallet and extracted a laminated photo of himself and his grown daughter standing in front of the baseball diamond at Fenway Park. He wanted to let us know he was a "real fan."

That was a stark contrast to the snarky hotel employee who gave The Youngest Boy’s Miami Heat hat his approval while telling the rest of us he’d have to overlook our Sox caps.

Once our waiter at the NBA City restaurant learned we were Sox fans from the Hub, he told us he was a Yankee fan but would still give us good service nonetheless.

We ran into another Yankee fan at the car rental return next to the airport who joked that he was going to charge us at a higher rate for being members of Red Sox Nation.

And there must’ve been at least one other female Red Sox fan in the women’s bathroom in the Jurassic Park section of Universal Studios because when The Girl accidentally left her Sox cap there, it never turned up again, despite the fact that we checked the bathroom and Lost & Found three times over the course of three days.

Jaws & Reliving the 70s

The Spouse got to relive part of his 70s childhood by venturing onto the Jaws ride at Universal Studios. Twice. I, the Picket Fence Post family's ride wimp, accompanied him during his second time through while the three kids, who had absolutely zero interest in the ride, sulked on a bench and played with my cell phone. As the cheesy plastic shark first emerged from the water, The Spouse and I realized that this was the only time during the daylight hours that we'd alone the whole week.

Space Shuttle: The Last Mission

It poured, absolutely poured to the point where you couldn’t see the road in front of you, as we were driving from Orlando to the Kennedy Space Center and The Youngest Boy was thoroughly ticked that we’d taken a day off from patronizing amusement/theme parks and opted to visit a NASA institution. And boy, did he let us know it, during that awful car ride in torrential downpours.

After spending a half hour sitting in the parking lot and waiting for the rain to let up, then another half hour standing in line to buy tickets to get into the Space Center, we finally boarded a bus to see the Space Shuttle Atlantis that's currently sitting on the launch pad. By the time we scaled the observation deck, luckily The Youngest Boy’s skepticism, and whining, was on the wane. When we left, he was thoroughly impressed, mostly because he "touched the moon," meaning a moon rock that was available for people to touch.

Image credits: Meredith O'Brien, IMDB.com.

Disgruntled Dispatches from the Kitchen

I’m having a senior moment and I’m only in my 40s. Found in the microwave oven this afternoon: Leftover roasted sweet potatoes I had heated up yesterday to go along with a pretty good dinner I'd made but then completely forgot about. Sadly, this is not the first time I've left food in the microwave overnight in the past year.

And while I'm on the subject of the kitchen and food, you know those kids of mine who barely eat the dinners I make for them – last night I spent 1.5 hours preparing dinner and they barely ate any of it,  seriously, their refusal to eat the healthy meals I make is really cheesing me off – they’re eating everything else in the house but dinner and rendering our pantry looking like a photo of a Leningrad grocery store with barren shelves as they complain that there's nothing to eat.

Given that the eldest two Picket Fence Post kids are nearly teenagers (God help me) and The Youngest Boy’s appetite is voracious -- except for good old Mom’s homemade dinners of course -- I think I’m going to be spending way more time than I’d like in the grocery store this summer. The grocery bill is going to bankrupt me.