everyday life

We have family dinner a few nights a week.  Sunday, always, without variation.  And usually one or two other nights a week.  Understanding as I do how crucial family dinner is to happy, well-adjusted children, I feel guilt about this.  I wish we sat down more often.  But we do it when we can, and what continues to surprise and delight me is how much both Grace and Whit love it when we have family dinner.  “Are we having family dinner?” one of them will ask, breathlessly, if they see me setting the dining room table.  We always have family dinner in the dining room.  We always have candles, and usually flowers.  And I love family dinner.  There are lots of reasons why, but here are some:

Compliments.  Grace started a tradition years ago which has stuck, and which I love.  At dinner each of us says “compliments” which really are specific thanks to each family members. We take turns thanking each member of the family for specific things they did that we noticed and appreciated over the past day or two.  We do this without fail when we all sit down together, and I absolutely love it.

Using the silver.  I learned this from my mother, who always believed in using the silver (and still does).  I do too (we have the same silver pattern, incidentally).  Part of what makes this doable is that I put my silver in the dishwasher without hesitation.  And Kathryn introduced me to silver polish wipes recently, which changed my life.

Cheers. We always cheers at the start of dinner, and the sight of the four glasses, three water and one milk, always makes me smile.
There’s usually some yelling, “Grace!  We’re waiting for you!” or “Whit!  Anytime now!” but once we’re all seated, before we begin, we cheers as a family.

A sense of celebration. There’s something about setting the table, lighting candles, and sitting down together, without books or electronics, that I fiercely love.  It’s a way of celebrating this ordinary life, of pausing in the slipstream of life to note how rich it is, if head-spinningly fast-moving.  It’s the practice of being grateful for the poem.

Traditions are important to me, and this is one that has become a backbone of our family life.  I dearly hope that Grace and Whit will grow up remembering family dinner, and seeing each others’ faces in the glow of candles, and taking the time to think of and articulate specific things we are grateful for about each other.

Do you have family dinner?  Or other family traditions that mark everyday life and that matter a lot to you?  I’d love to hear about them.

I have often discussed the dissonance that comes from staring 40 in the face while still feeling like I’m 18.  Or maybe 21.

But now and then I am reminded that I can’t be that young anymore, mostly when I realize that Grace and Whit really are growing up in a hugely different world than the one in which I did.  I love those lists of things that children of the 70s can relate to, and they always make me laugh.

Grace and Whit, though, are children of the 21st century.  Herewith, eleven ways my children are growing up in a world different than that in which I was a child:

1. They love – in fact, prefer – to talk on the phone on speaker.  This segues nicely into being very comfortable with FaceTiming.  I had a conversation recently with the ear of someone in their 60s over FaceTime because they assumed that you hold a phone to your ear.  I’m somewhere in between these two poles.  We’ve come a long way from the phone on the kitchen wall with the long twisty cord.

2. They don’t think a device needs charging until it is actually dead.  I start looking around frantically for a plug when I’m at about 70%.

3. Their passion for YouTube knows no bounds.  It is almost always the first stop in trying to find anything – music OR video – online.

4. They love scented things.  This may not be generational, but in our house it is.  Grace walks around billowing clouds of Wonderstruck by Taylor Swift.  Me?  Unscented.  Less glamour, sure, but also less choking.

5. Carseats are so integral a part of life in America that cars come with built-in tethers for them.  In our day?  Floating around the “way back” (untethered to anything) was my favorite way to travel.

6. They have never known a world when TV shows were on certain times, on certain days.  Friday night was when Dallas was on, and you had better be there at 8:00 to watch it, or else you were taking a big risk if you tried to program your VCR.  They want to watch something?  They just click to it.  Incredible.  And VCR?  They have no idea what that is.  They don’t even know what “to Tivo something” means.

7. They wouldn’t know what a mimeograph machine is if it hit them in the head.  The smell of those purply-blue print pages, however, takes me back to grade school faster than almost anything else.  Grace and Whit log onto the class Google Drive to check their homework assignment.  I flipped through the mimeographed pages in my Trapper Keeper.

8. Their ability to suspend disbelief is pretty weak.  I see this when we watch old movies – notably, lately, The Princess Bride.  “Those are not real,” Grace scoffed when the rodents of unusual size scurried across the screen.  I blame the extremely lifelike special effects in movies today.

9. Photography is an unlimited exercise for them: we were recently discussing buying a disposable underwater camera, and Whit asked whether we bought memory cards for it.  No, I explained, you had 27 exposures, and that was it.  Both Grace and Whit were frankly aghast at the idea of paying per photograph, of pictures only in hard copy, of having to wait overnight to have your film developed.  In fact, at the word “film” at all.  Totally foreign.  I like digital photography myself, an awful lot, but I do think that we have lost some discernment and care now that a camera roll is unlimited.

10. They don’t know a single phone number.  For that matter, neither do I.  Whereas I can still remember the (home) numbers of my childhood home as well as a few close friends.  Those were the numbers I punched into that kitchen phone with the twisty cord.  Grace and Whit don’t have to remember anything since it’s all programmed.

11. They don’t know how to read a map.  My father always told me that one of the most essential life skills was ability to read a map while traveling.  Now, my aforementioned carsickness often got in the way here, but I do know how to read a map and often joke that I’m one of the last remaining people who prints out maps before going somewhere.  Grace and Whit just assume a destination will be punched into a GPS and we’ll be guided there.

Are you a child of the 70s?  Are you parenting a child of the 21st century?  What differences do you note in growing up now vs. growing up then?