A piece of cake? A very large piece of cake... supersize me!
Double Yum
Yum!
Choices, Choices, Choices
Baseball, Apple Pie and Education- Food Edition!
After our beach day, we spent the next couple of days enjoying sumptuous meals, close baseball games and, when we arrived in Princeton, a look at the University. Although I do not want to "b"word you with details about all of the powerhouse baseball we witnessed and the amazing food we consumed over the next couple of days, I do want to say that sharing a meal is a wonderful way to get to know someone. We shared a lot of meals with our visiting family from Australia, but our family meals have always been legendary, mythical. We can sit around a table for hours eating, talking and reminiscing. It has been that way as long as I can remember! Some of our most poignant family memories have taken place around that dining room table meal. Engagements, pregnancies (well, the announcements thereof), reunions, vocations, holidays and celebrations of every kind have been initiated by a family meal. I was actually taken aback a couple of months ago when one of my sons had a friend over to the parsonage around meal time. When I invited her to stay for supper, my son assured me that they would be snacking downstairs because she wasn't ready for the Fallon Family Table... Say what? How do you prepare a friend to have a meal with us? What is it like extended deep sea diving? A moon landing...Ouch!
But getting back to our meals all around the east coast this summer- we ate and we ate and we ate some more. My poor cousins' children... At least our sons, Colin and Ian knew what they were in for when we would gather around the table at mealtime. Sometimes they would just have their blanket and pillows ready... just in case. Luckily, Pascal and Sweeney were so great! Pascal would speak right up about whatever the grow-ups were discussing, and little Sweeney would comply with any request and loved to blow bubbles with his drink. Even when we were at the baseball game, we ate until we couldn't eat any more and one topic of conversation would lead to the next. I worried about being a corrupting influence on the cousins' diets. When they arrived, they were small-portioned, varied-colored fruit and veggie eaters. (Notice picture on top from Day two where Mandy and Sweeney are having asparagus with their fries!) After only a day with us, we had transformed their diets to saturated fat, refined white sugar free-for-alls! I can't imagine the withdrawals when they returned to their regular healthy diets. (Shudder)
Our first day in Boston started out with my health-conscious friend Kathy and I racing through the grocery store aisles trying to assemble breakfast before the cousins awoke. We came around the corner almost crashing into each other as I tried to shamefully hide my selections. (Now I could digress here to say that Kathy and I were roommates in college, and she did not always eat as well as she did today, but I won't.) I saw her eyebrows raise heavenward, and she slowly enunciated, "What do you think you are buying?"
When I boldly pulled them from the fold of my arms, I placed the colorful box out in front of me and said, "Tri-colored, sugar oh's." (The name has been changed to protect the ... innocent.)
Kathy slowly nodded her head back and forth like a Martha Stewart bobbing head doll and slowly stated, "You are not bringing that high fructose corn syrup into my house, Missy! No siree Bob."Then began the complex negotiations that began with my "sugar oh's" and her cereal that looked like baled straw; we compromised with Life cereal. I had donuts; she had bagels. And so it continued until I screamed, "But I just want them to be happy!" And so it was that, without even getting the food to the table, my girlfriend Kathy and I were brought even closer. See what I mean? Meals bring people together:)
Stay tuned in the next installment of my blog entitled... Princeton, a great university or just another place to strap on the ol' feed bag?
No comments:
Post a Comment