Dinner (and dress-up) with the visiting cousins

My sisters both live out of state and visit only two or three times a year. One of the best things for me about living next door to my parents is that we don’t have to spend time planning which household my sisters and their families will visit when. Instead, we all circulate indiscriminately between the two houses for the duration of their stay.

Sometimes we even plan a big family dinner with everyone sitting down at my parents’ long, narrow antique dining table together at a set time. But gradually, over the years, we’ve grown wiser. Although my older sister’s two teenage daughters have impeccable manners, my younger sister and I collectively have four children currently ranging in age from five to eleven, and we know better than to expect the centerpiece of any visit to be an organized sit-down multigenerational dinner. We’ve discovered over the years that the best times with all the cousins together happen over a craft project or a swim in the pond. A walk to the ice cream stand or an excursion to the playground usually works out well for everyone too. Big family dinners, not so much.

And yet sometimes they still end up at our house at dinnertime. Not having planned it out ahead of time, we have no great expectations for gentility; instead, on nights like last night, we sometimes just succumb to the urge to let the free-for-all happen and the pieces fall where they may. And even if it can be a bear of a job to clean up afterwards, it usually ends up being more fun than anything we could have tried to plan out.

Yesterday, my sister’s two children, Hannah and Andrew, were still playing at our house well after six o’clock, and Sarah wanted to go for a run, so I started making dinner. The kids’ games had evolved from making food out of play-dough and playing restaurant with it to using the back of the playroom couch as a balance beam, so they were already getting pretty wild. Rick had to go to a coaches’ meeting, so I’d planned an informal dinner of leftovers. When Sarah got back from her run, she and I started pulling things out of the fridge. Stir-fried vegetables. Marinated pork strips. Cooked basmati. Chicken turnovers. Pan-fried cod fillets. Pasta with roasted cherry tomato sauce. It was hard to believe all of these items had been main courses at my family’s dinner table within just the past few days: now the variety looked more overwhelming than appetizing, as we lined up all the Tupperware on the edge of the counter and tried to predict who might want what to eat.

Andrew, who is five, came downstairs to tell us they had been playing dress-up. Chances are we would have figured that out for ourselves: he was shirtless and wearing a magenta tutu with a headband holding butterfly antennae on his head. He looked like the character Mango from Saturday Night Live. (As my friend Leigh said when she dropped by to pick up her son and caught a glimpse of Andrew, “Now that’s a blackmail photo waiting to happen!”) Then Tim, the oldest at eleven, appeared in the kitchen repeating a chant about frogs and port-a-potties. Hannah, who like Holly is seven, showed up wearing a pair of Holly’s jeans instead of the striped dress in which she’d arrived at our house. Holly was conservatively clad in a pink velvet ball gown.

Dinner was a little complicated, as we pieced together leftovers for everyone and tried to keep the play-dough food separate from the real food, but we got through it and we had fun. Our standards of decorum at these thrown-together meals are low. We insist on modulated voices – both Sarah and I have a very low tolerance for kids who shriek – but other than that, we roll with it.

It was a quick meal for the kids. I offered to make s’mores in the oven for dessert; three of the four kids wanted one, but Sarah and I ended up eating most of them ourselves. By the time they were made, the kids were upstairs playing Nerf baseball. Andrew still had his tutu on.

Every time they visit, we seem to have at least one evening like this: mayhem from an outside perspective, but just typical fun from our point of view. The cousins get to spend some time together. By ten minutes after dinner, we had the kitchen all cleaned up. Everyone had eaten from a majority, if not all, of the major food groups. The kids were ready for baths.

Maybe next time they visit we’ll resuscitate the tradition of a big family dinner in my parents’ dining room. For this week, leftovers and s’mores seemed like the way to go. Messy and disorganized? Yes, but everyone had fun and got along well. As far as I’m concerned, Andrew in his magenta tutu is welcome for dinner any time.