Our Family: Loud, Hungry & Competitive

I'm Lindsie, and I've spent the last 15 years creating recipes, building meal plans, and attempting to answer the question every family asks approximately 47 times a week: "What are we eating?" There was a time when I planned an entire month of meals, week by week. It was organized, efficient, and exactly what our family needed.

 

Now, things are a little different.

 

I do all of this with my husband, DJ, who is also my best friend and favorite person to have by my side through the chaos. While I attempt to cook in a kitchen that somehow looks messy before I've even started, DJ sets up the evening's game, learns the rules, and prepares to teach the rest of us.

 

It's a pretty good system - until I need an ingredient I know I bought. Where is the cheese? What happened to the bread? Didn't we have an entire box of that yesterday? Oh, right. The teenagers ate it.

 

We have the teenage boys: my son and his BFF, who stays with us often enough to count. They eat everything in sight and seem to consider leftovers a personal failure. I'm not saying they have hollow legs, but science has yet to provide me with a better explanation for where all that food goes. Then there's my 8-year-old, a tiny food critic with expensive taste. He'd eat sushi every day if I allowed it, craves carbs constantly, and will eat just about anything... as long as it's the exact thing he wants at the exact moment he decides he's hungry.

 

After 15 years of meal planning, you'd think I'd have this down to a science. Unfortunately, no amount of planning can account for two bottomless teenage boys and an 8-year-old ordering from an invisible menu only he can see. Some weeks, dinner is carefully planned down to the last side dish. Other weeks, "Food" earns a legitimate spot on the menu and Saturday is officially a problem for Future Us.

When we aren't trying to keep everyone fed, we're usually gathered around the table playing one of the more than 550 board games in our collection.

 

DJ is our official rules reader and game teacher, which means the rest of us get to sit down, ask questions he literally just answered, and begin playing. When we visit someone else's house, DJ packs the board-game bag with games carefully selected to match the vibe. Casual afternoon? He has a game for that. Competitive adults? There's a game for that. Mixed ages, questionable attention spans, and no idea how long we're staying? Somehow, he has games for that too. Me? I handle the meals.

 

There's usually a vinyl record playing in the background while we cook and play. DJ and I both love collecting and listening to records, although our teenager has somehow built a better punk-rock vinyl collection than either of us - which feels a little disrespectful, considering we were here first. Meanwhile, the 8-year-old knows how to operate the record player better than I do, so I've apparently been demoted in my own house.