I have been "served"

There is nothing like sitting in between two children that constantly try to outdo each other in everything. I mean everything: screaming, telling on each other, sports, drawing, nap taking, you name it, both of my children have done it better than the other. I can usually ignore it for the most part, however they seem to save the best arguments for when we sit down at the table to eat.

Mostly it is telling on each other. "Sissy isn't sitting right!"
"Well, Little Dude isn't eating at all, he's just talking!"
"Mommy, she's talking with food in her mouth!"
"You still aren't eating anything! I don't want to sit here and wait, while you finish your dinner!"

And it goes on, until it is reduced to "Uh-huh!" "Nuh-uh!" based arguing, in which I normally clap my hands on the table or yell, "For the love of anything, Shut IT!"

I know that I am not alone in this area. I am fully aware that there are parents around the world, dealing with this sibling...love and attention. It stands to reason that they would not go to these measures if there wasn't some sort of love or affection towards one another, right?!

After dealing with this for months, almost every night, I either ignore it until I can't take it anymore or I invoke the "no talking during dinner" rule. I realize this breaks down the entire reason we come together every night to eat dinner. You know, the conversations and family memories that are made at the table. The conversations and family togetherness that they will remember fondly, years from now. (It's a frail hope, but I'm still hanging on to this, so please don't cut the thin thread that is holding it together.)

Last night was a little different.

I attempted to make a pizza crust out of cauliflower. Yes the white broccoli vegetable. I think it was supposed to be a gluten-free option, but something went wrong, epic-fail kind of wrong! It tasted good, but was not up to my standards of what I consider a pizza crust. (For example, I expect my crust to come off the pain without scraping it into pieces.) So I quickly threw in my back up personal pizzas from the freezer and then we sat down to eat.

They were quiet because they were actually eating. I was amazed, there was no yelling or telling me they didn't like the food (without ever trying it, ugh!) I should have known something was off.

Our personal pizzas come in a pack of four. Normally, we eat three and then Princess inhales part of the fourth one. For some reason, Little Dude (who rarely finishes one) wanted to stake claim on part of the fourth pizza. I explained that they could both have half of the pizza and everything would be fair.

Finally, Little Dude looks up from his pizza and yells at Princess, "Princess, you are eating too fast! Slow down!"

(This is a normal occurrence at meal times, because Princess likes to only breathe between bites, therefore she inhales her food.)

Princess looks back and calmly says, "I'm not eating too fast."

I take this moment to look over at her plate and see that out of four sections of pizza she's currently working on her third. "Princess, maybe you need to slow down a little, please."

This is the moment when everything goes wrong, horribly wrong.

Princess looks down at her plate, then she looks at mine, looks up at me and says, "I'll slow down when you do."

(Oh crap.)

I am currently working on my third section of pizza, also. What can I say? After my epic fail in the cauliflower pizza crust department, I had gotten a little peckish. The Saturday Night Live skit comes to mind, when Chris Farley's character is wolfing down the fries and one of the other characters mentions that she was on a diet. Chris Farley's character responds by saying, "I'M STARVING!!!" Yeah, it was a little like that.

Little Dude sensed the shift, I think, because then he starts talking about how sissy is going to eat his pizza. I explain "Princess won't get any extra pizza until you are finished. How about next time we try not talking with our mouth full of food please?"

Little Dude looks up at me, "But you have food in your mouth!"

(Oh crap)

After this point, I figured good manners were out the door, so-to-speak, and just shut my mouth and ate quietly. The kids started laughing and I finally joined them. All-in-all it turned out to be a pretty good dinner.