When I was growing up, my mom, sister and I always had dinnertime together. No matter what was going on in our busy days, our meals where where we conversed. Now that I am a mom, I found out how hard that is to actually accomplish. When you have everybody travelling in different directions such as soccer practice, homework, TV shows, work, and social life it can be hard to get everyone at the table at the same time. However hard it may be, it is something that you should try to do at least 4 times a week.
The Benefits Of Eating Together As A Family
- Communication: This is the time where you can share the stories of your day, learn about what is going on in your children’s lives, and bond. Food is a great lubricant for conversation, and isn’t open communication what makes all relationships work?
- Leading By Example: As parents, we all want the best for our kids. By modeling good table manners, etiquette and leading my example, we give our children a head start in life. At the dinner table, you basically have a captive audience for 30 minutes to an hour. This is the perfect time to teach about trying new foods. You can teach about other cultures and tolerance for people, cuisine, and ideas that are different from ours. My kids have eaten sushi since they were one. I love that they have such an open mind.
- Save Money: When you prepare and cook your meals at home, you save money. Everyone knows that dining out with the entire family can become quite costly and on average about $40-$50 for four. Most meals you prepare at home wind up costing between $4 and $17 for four people (with leftovers)
The reason why I am telling you this is because recently, we did not have a dining room table to eat at and I felt the lack of communication in our family. So when I went to search for a new table, I wanted to make sure that it would be sturdy against toddlers, adaptable to our small space, and would last a long time. I also wanted it to be pretty for my food pictures for the recipes on Makobi Scribe. Since I am a Personal Shopper at Sears, I knew that it was the best choice to search for what I wanted. I created a catalog of the dining room tables I was interested in on ShopYourWay. This let me narrow down my choices from the thousands of products that came up when I typed dining room table. I was able to search by price, material, size, shape and more to get exactly what I was looking for.
When I saw the Dining Set with Storage, I knew it was for me. It had the dark wood to match my curio, and had wooden seats that would be easy to clean with the kids. It was an adjustable size with two side leafs to allow 2 to 4 seats. Perfect for the 48″ space I had available. It even had storage underneath which is a dream when you are utilizing a small space.
When the table arrived, it was in a huge box and had to be put together piece by piece. The instructions were fairly simple to follow, and my husband remarked how this table was put together like furniture should be! He was impressed with the quality of the materials, and had me come over several times to show me why this was the way a bolt should attach or a chair should piece together. After a few hours, our beautiful dining room table was assembled and our family was able to eat dinner together as a family again.