Junk Food Dinner

Anyone who knows me knows that I was a much better parent before I actually had children. Yes, I had many firmly held beliefs about how life was going to be, most importantly that I would never feed my children anything other than the most delectable, organic, local produce and that they would sit politely at my table, thanking me for feeding them grass fed beef and free range chicken (okay, Jane and El, you can stop laughing now). Fast forward to today.

My kids are like all kids in that they like the kind of stuff that makes us adults blanch but I've come up with a way to neutralize a lot of the noise. Twice a year we have something called "Junk Food Dinner." I go to the grocery store and buy chicken wings, cheese sticks. pizza bagels, potato skins and any other food-like items that the kids want that I would normally never allow to darken my door. We get a great movie (or in last night's case, the first season of Glee) and have a picnic in the living room eating the most disgusting food on the planet. The great thing about it is that if they ask me to buy these things at any other point during the year I can just tell them that we will have it at the next junk food dinner and the whinging stops. Genius, if I do say so myself.

p.s. I'm not a big scripted television fan but Glee is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I dare you to watch even one episode without wanting to get up and dance.