My Son is a "Fungi"

Meal time is a big deal at our house. Not that we have a linen table cloth, shiny charger plates, or sparkling crystal on a daily basis - we don't. What we do have is time to talk - every day.

Week days begin with breakfast for everyone. We don't all eat the same things, but we do eat together. While my son blows the steam from his oatmeal and waits for his sausage to cool, I pour glasses of juice and distribute vitamins all around. My husband joins us within a few minutes, standing next to his chair while he finishes fussing with his tie. At that point, I have a couple of plates of doctored eggs and toast to put down so we can all start the day off well. During the hubbub that precedes the actual eating, we catch snippets of the news, query whomever was in the kitchen about the weather forecast, and push each other headlong into the day with, "I'd like to go a few minutes early; I have a meeting." or "Mom, can I get off the bus at Alec's house after school?" Breakfast is pretty hectic, but we all manage to start each day together.

Likewise, we end it the same way. Sometimes we eat our dinner in the theater watching a DVD (especially on pizza night), but we all gather for the making of dinner. It's funny, because when I was a kid making dinner seemed an independent task assigned to Mom alone. Sure, we wandered through the kitchen sometimes to check the progress of the meal, as in "How long until dinner? I'm starved!" or "Do I have time to call Theresa?" But we didn't generally spend the prep time in the kitchen, though we did come together for dinner every night. Even on date night, we were generally expected to eat at home unless we were specifically going out to dinner with someone, which was rare indeed. If my brother or I wanted a date to start before our normal dinner time, the other party would have to join us for the meal. (You can imagine this didn't happen often, since teens seldom want their significant others to watch them eat, so perish the thought of eating at home complete with siblings and parents!)

But it's different at our house. The meal itself may not be accompanied by in-depth conversation because the cooking time probably was. When I walk into the kitchen to start dinner (or make cookies, or look for a snack, even) my son seems to miraculously appear from the basement. Since I don't fix dinner at a set time every night, it can't be that he watches the clock. He just knows when I'm in the kitchen. These days he bounds up the stairs carrying his guitar which he quietly picks at and plays with while he recounts the events of the day. I get a rundown, class by class, of academic activities and smart alec comments his friends made. His stories of lunch are generally hilarious since he and his friends loudly recite their favorite You Tube videos, quote strange songs, chase each other across the quad, and duel with sporks. I'm sure all this frivolity must be counterproductive to the serious nature of education, but I'm happy that a 6'2" almost 15-year-old can still be a kid.

In addition to his daily play-by-play, my son throws out random facts about whatever I'm cooking. Tonight I made mushroom stroganoff so he told me strange things about mushrooms like why they grow in circles after it rains, why those circles are called fairy rings, and that the fungus part is really what is underground, not the mushroom itself. He even mentioned that the world's largest fungus is over four miles long and growing in Oregon. I haven't verified this information, so don't take it as the gospel truth. One of my son's best traits is his ability to entertain (which he gets from dear old Dad). Thus, he intersperses odd facts that he picked up from books or Discovery channel shows with things that sound good, even if they aren't true. As his dad always says, "It makes a good story." Those stories are now synonymous with dinner time at our house. Eating together is only a small part of the fun. It's the pre-dinner show that I enjoy most, and if I hang around the kitchen after dinner - perhaps contemplating a batch of cookies before T.V. time - I get an encore performance. Hmm... It's show time.