Feed Your People

My children made my day unexpectedly happy. 

I feel that all my parenting failures are absolved.
😄

Gathered around the kitchen island, my daughter sitting on it, swinging her legs and my son perusing the kitchen drawer for a snack, we chatted about a few of their childhood memories.

Two of their favorites?!

1. Snack time. Every day at 3 p.m. It was always an event. They served themselves and had a grand time pretending and imagining. {Obviously, they weren’t toddlers anymore at this point} From playing King and Queen to Operating an Ice Cream Shop to packing a picnic for outdoors, {and sometimes eating it on the roof of the little playhouse or flat-roofed shed} Snack Time was indeed an important matter. What’s more, it mattered. It made itself into a memory.
2. Curling up in a chair together to watch a movie.  I’d tuck a cozy blanket around them bringing little bowls of popcorn or a variety of snack to munch on.

Please know, I’m not tapping this out in bragging tones…….. though I might proudly take a bow if you’d insist. 😉  I’m simply so pleased. I messed up way too often. I wish I would have been more patient. I wish I would have laughed more and been less irritated with messes. {Still could use much improvement on the less irritation with messes, truth be told}


I don’t endorse boasting, but I do encourage celebrating wins.


I can easily recount my weaknesses and failures in a never-ending recorded voice, in quite chiding tones I might add, but when it comes to creating a cozy happiness in the everyday of today, with a fun snack, movie or book, and a good blanket, I have that covered! {pun intended}


It’s my heritage. I grew up with a mother and grandmother who fixed meals & meals, questioning if “We were sure we’d had our fill?”

Boxes of oranges every December. Grandma’s tapioca with bananas, her creamed lima beans and spinach salad. Mother’s chili soup with cornbread, and meatloaf with homemade mac-and-cheese. Donuts and orange push-ups for snack time…
Chicken barbecues in the summer and homemade ice cream. Frozen fruit cups, popsicles and raspberries straight from the patch.


Tall icy-cold sixteen ounce Pepsi bottles out of the machine in my Grandpa’s storage shed on his potato farm. The bottles of long ago, where you popped off the cap using the opener on the pop machine. Glass bottles, long neck, the kind almost as tall as you were as a skinny six-year old tipping it up to catch the very last drop. Grandpa loved chocolate and every year at Christmas we knew what we’d find in the basement. A twenty pound bar and a small chisel with Grandpa wedging off chunks for us. I loved the smooth, melty feeling of that chocolate in my mouth.

Food memories are in my legacy and I’m so extremely grateful for this!

Here’s the moral of my tale and my two-cents-worth-of-advice: Feed Your People. It matters, more than we even know. Serving a delicious meal or simple snack is a gift. It creates welcome, it nurtures, it says, “I see you. I care about you. Enjoy.” 

Feed your people like the royalty they are in your life. And perhaps, play King and Queen at snack time! 😄😉

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