Dear Folks,
We are pretending to be fancy today. We bought some brie for $4.97 a pound. It tastes good, but is usually out of our price range. We are smearing the brie on some free whole grain bread which we got in Sharing Shop & Manna Ministry, of my seminary. We don't really have class, but it sure is fun pretending with my children.
Last night, I took my children to an international dinner function at the Ledford Center, a social activities center in our school. I enjoyed it, but my daughter did not. Because of the way the noise of the gratuitously loud music grates on her, we will not do such a thing again.
It took all of three hours to get through. There was a lot of good food, which always sits well with me, even though I did not get to eat much of it, as I was attending to David and Christopher throughout the time we were together, and they keep my hands full, which, if you're not a father, I can highly recommend as a means of keeping you out of trouble.
Just now, I hear my two middle boys behind me playing, each with a padook board and some stones, making noises of armies colliding and weapons sounding off in the heat of battle. Occasionally, you hear the voices of commanders radioing information and the issuing of commands to their underlings, mixed in with terse utterances of dismay at being seemingly overwhelmed by the sheer size of the enemy forces descending on them at the moment, ensuring a battle of epic proportions.
My thematic question is this, "Why must mock battles in the minds of boys always be epic? Why can they not at least some of the time enact an imaginary battle wherein the two sides engage only in light skirmish ... or better yet, meet, have a parley, and decide to come to terms of peace, obviating any need for bloodshed on that day?" Soldiers could then engage in a pick-up football game, or if they don't know how to handle a pigskin, then perhaps they could enjoy a round or two of soccer.
After that, they could settle down to some tea and biscuits with blueberry jam and apple butter. It's always good to have at least two distinct flavors of jam available for your guests, in my humble opinion.
I started a new rule in my home last week, and that is this: The whole family must eat supper together at 7:00 p.m. every day. The International Dinner disrupted the embodiment of that rule for the first time, and I do not now believe it was worth the opportunity to meet people from different nations and eat a goodly variety of different foods, even with the music and dances thrown in the bargain.
When it comes to family time, little can trump a good, steady family meal together. Given the paucity of recipes mastered by either me or my wife, we pretty much eat the same stuff every time, but that's perhaps part of the enduring beauty of our experience.
Formerly, we rarely ate a meal together. In fact, in keeping with the triathlon training grazing routine I had been accustomed to following over the past few decades, we pretty much ate a little here and there all day long.
Though that seemed to work well, and served us well indeed when I we were all so much busier, especially with me working in excess of 60 hours a week of teaching English. It is wonderful to have the whole family sitting around a table. I will upload a photo of the first day we did that, about six or seven days ago.
Love, Nathaniel
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