What do you do at your kitchen table?

Toward the end of our NWEI discussion group Menu for the Future, an interesting question came up: what do you do at your kitchen table?

I think I chimed in first, making a list of the many things we do:

• We do homework
• We read the paper
• There's a TV right next that should only be on while we're making dinner, but sometimes is on for vice-presidential debates and Blazers games alarmingly close and quite possibly overlapping with actual eating time (but almost never. really)
• We make and decorate cookies about once a year
• We drink coffee
• The kids color, draw and do art
• They used to do play-dough there back when I let them play with play-dough
• Oh and we eat there: three meals a day, plus snacks

I was surprised to find that my list was substantially longer than most everyone else's who kept it simple at: we eat there. I feel like my family has come a long way. Reading In Defense of Food was ground-breaking for me. It really shifted the way we think about food, and I have much higher hopes for our ability to actually savor food and enjoy meal-times. But, truthfully, we still have a long way to go.

That said, what do you do at your kitchen table? And let's keep it G-rated, people.