Friday dinner with my parents

My parents have just returned from a 3-week trip and are coming to dinner at our house, which is something we look forward to. It’s a mini-tradition of sorts that they come over for dinner soon after returning from a trip; it gives us a chance to hear about their travels and it gives them a chance to catch up on our home life. (And on the rare occasions when we go on a trip, we do the whole thing in reverse. But they are retired and travel more than we do.)

I’m making chicken pot pie, a favorite of Rick, the kids and my father. At some point in the next two hours I’ll come up with a vegetable-based idea that my mother and I will like. Yesterday Mom gave me a ripe honeydew melon, and Holly has a brand-new melon baller that she loves using, so she’ll prepare it for dessert: a cascade of tiny melon balls in which she’ll take endless pride.

While their dinner visits are not exactly a carved-in-stone tradition, it is something we try to do often, to take advantage of living so close to them. Some things about the visits never change. My father always keeps his jacket on the whole time even though one (lesser) reason Rick and I look forward to their visits is that it gives us an excuse to turn the heat up over our usual 60-degree norm. My mother always forgets which cabinet we keep our wine glasses in (as well as our forks, napkins, and trash can). But I can’t blame her; we have a lot of cabinets, and they all look alike. The kids always get very excited to have my parents here and do various amounts of showing off. Tim usually drags my father upstairs to see him play some form of video game and then challenges him to a boxing match (real, not virtual), and Holly usually trots out some new stickers for group admiration. I’m hoping that tonight, Holly will do a reading of the chapter book (she calls it a “chackter book”) she’s been working on so diligently; the chapter she wrote last night had both Rick and me howling in laughter. In truth, I suspect someone with more knowledge of the second-grade library might find many parts of it somewhat derivative, but Holly loves the writing process, so I’ll do whatever I can to encourage her to continue with it.

Like all parent-and-children combinations, we all have our differences, but one of the advantages of being neighbors is that there isn’t a lot riding on any one visit. As host as well as daughter, I’ll hope that everyone has fun tonight, but either way, we’ll all see each other again tomorrow. It’s not like traveling halfway across the country for a holiday visit with family and feeling that it will either be boom or bust. We spend so much time with my parents – sometimes for scheduled events like this dinner and just as often for drop-in visits, farmyard tasks or walks – that there are always more opportunities to catch up with each other.

Still, I’m looking forward to it. I’m even looking forward to making the chicken pot pie. And something with butternut squash, if I can pull up a recipe. And an apple crisp, if I can get it started in time. I’d better get to work.