Amy: Am I hoggin' this blog?! Okay, I'd like to discuss our family dinner last night...

As a rule family dinners in the Stone home are a 'no-no'. It started once Audrey started eating table food. By whatever perfect storm of circumstances you want to blame, I developed big time stomach issues when Audrey was about 2. Which means that about the time we would have started having family meals, family meals became physically and emotionally painful.

I am married to a very tidy man who does not tolerate mealtime disruption well. Add this to severe stomach pain when such stressors occur, and let's just say, we penciled in a family meal once a week out of sheer guilt. The rest of the time, the kids eat in front of the TV and we eat in blessed silence when they are in bed, like God intended.

As is typical, because we denied them our company during mealtime, 'family dinner' became desireable. I mean, c'mon - you really want to sit there and have me criticize your vegetable to starch consumption ratio? Having your dad micromanage your table manners is fun for you?! Yeah, I guess we are that fantastic.

So, okay fine. Family dinners then. About two years ago we ramped it up to 4 - 5 nights a week. Felt a bit like torture to Brad and I but we put forth the work effort. Of course about this time the girls decided that they really only liked about 5 foods. Those 5 foods of course rotated randomly through the sweet/starch/chickenfried food spectrum - best I could tell, pretty much randomly. After about a year of making two dinners (flat out stupid) and a year of making dinners that we all might like (flat out impossible) I decided to just make some food that Brad and I enjoyed. Kids were invited of course, but I braced for the inevitable fallout on a nightly basis.

And fall out it did. I would spend hours planning menus and making meals only to have Lilly start laying the groundwork for not eating at about 3:15. She'd ask (she thought slyly) what we'd be having, and then, after what I am sure seemed to her a reasonably long time period, she'd start to drop hints about phantom stomach aches, or how she ate so much for lunch, or how she'd bravely forego dessert as she just simply couldn't eat any dinner. You have to understand that Lilly will eat a clod of dirt if it is served in a restaurant, but anything served in our home is viewed with skepticism at the very least, with downright suspicion being ultimately more typical.

Let's just say this didn't do much for my GERD.

So Monday I asked Brad if there was anything he wanted me to fix for dinners this week. He'd just read this National Geographic article about the 100 best foods and he suggested (with a straight face) that I 'try to encorporate some of those foods' into our menu. Ummm Hummm. Okay, buster, you asked for it.

Monday evening was butternut squash risotto (which Brad had decreed unacceptable weeks ago due to its shocking lack of meat content), grilled chicken and steamed asparagus. As the meals were plated I braced myself for the neonate fall out.

Not only was there no fall out, but I'm damn sure that those were not my children at the table. They were - my hand to God - FIGHTING over the asparagus. Lilly ate all her chicken (never happens, although she did dip it liberally in mayo - shudder!) and ate two leftover steamed shrimp from the night before. She also ate three asparagus spears and although she eschewed the rice for the most part, she did give it a good try and Audrey polished hers off with gusto. Brad and I kept eyeing each other over the table trying to make sure we weren't having some sort of hallucination.

It was the best family dinner ever.

So I figured my best bet was not to push it. They ate homemade pizza in front of SpongeBob tonight. I just need a few more hours to bask in the glory before we regress to the mean...