How many nights do you cook AND all sit down for dinner

ashleyaugust7

Maybe I am feeling masochistic today.  I am just curious- how many nights out of 5 (the work week) do you cook (or prepare a meal of leftovers) and all sit down and eat it at the same time, at the dinner table?

If you want to follow up with info like SAHM or WM, how many kids, what you manage to prepare , feel free.

[Poll]

tarebear9891

Right now we eat dinner together every night in some form. Some nights it is a cooked meal, some nights soup and sandwiches, etc. But we still try to eat together. That changes every semester though because I am a student and sometimes my classes are later. This semester I get home by 5 every day so I have enough time to cook.

Andrewsgal

I am a SAHM so I do believe it is a lot easier for me to cook dinner everynight. I can not imagine getting home at 6 and trying to get a full cooked meal on the table, baths, bed and all that jazz. FWIW we go out about 2 nights a week.

mylove2005

I said 4 but most of the time it is 5.  I work out of the home

xbrooklyngrl

I work FT and I get home with B around 5:15-5:30. I cook about 4 out of 5 days (give or take)

B and I usually sit down for dinner. DH gets home about the time we are getting ready for bath 8:30ish. Its tough, I usualyl don't have her in bed until 10pm or later.

shopgirl78

I answered for the work week and its at least 3 times that I cook and we sit down for dinner (MH is usually late though).  On the night we had dance (just ended in May), we generally ate out and then we generally have leftovers another night...I work out of the home and its really hard to cook on activity nights!

MrsStubbs

We always have family dinner together. We both work during the day so we are home together for dinner. Also, I have my sister and BIL over for dinner 1-2 times a week.

hikerbeth

Mine is so variable, but I put "3" as an average, because I teach an average of 2 evening aerobics classes during dinnertime, so DH cooks for/feeds the kids on those nights.

However, many weeks DH is traveling so we don't eat together those weeks.  That being said, I always sit down with the kids and eat on those nights, but it may not be the same type of meal I'd cook if DH was home.  On my aerobics nights, I give them a hearty snack before taking them to the gym daycare and then we eat a late dinner. . . either something really easy or take out.

j-w

I WOH part time, but we usually have 5 meals/work week together.  On the days that I work, we are home at 5 and DH gets home at 6.  We eat at 6.  I try to choose meals that can easily be prepared on M/W.  T/TH meals are more involved.  And, Friday is always homemade pizza.

dnagal

I work (out of home) full time.  DH works full time and has a 1.5 hr commute each way.  I cook for the kids first, then feed myself, then DH gets home and eats.  I can't make the kids wait for him (too late).

Mominator

I selected 4 because you are just talking about weekdays. We actually sit down and eat as a family typically 5 nights a week, but usually one night a week, either Thursday or Friday, we do take-out or go out to dinner. fwiw: my kids go to their Dad's 2 nights a week, if they were home 7 nights out of the week, we would eat as a family 7 nights a week. I do work full time and manage to cook most days because I do a lot of my meal planning and prep work on the weekends.

summerbrideDC

I voted for "3," but we don't eat those meals all together as a family.  The meals we eat together as a family are the ones we eat out at restaurants, 2-3 times a week (usually on weekends).  DH's work schedule is such that he gets home in time to put Ethan to bed at night, but Ethan usually eats earlier, and DH & I eat once Ethan's in bed.  So the meals I cook, 3 times a week or so, are just for DH and me.  I cook for DS every night, but its rarely the same thing I"m making for DH and me. 

DevonPow

I cook Monday-Thursday (Fridays are take-out night ) but we never all sit together. DH doesn't get home until 8:30 or so most nights. A lot of the time DS eats first and then DH and I eat together (I have always been a late dinner eater, though - eating dinner at 6 is waaaaaaay too early for me).

In the summer we are particularly bad about all eating together, just because DS and I are usually out at the park, etc. until the last possioble minute, then when we get home we kind of rush through dinner to get him in bed at a normal hour.

passar3588

I'm a SAHM and I cook every night during the work week and we all sit down for dinner together. My DH works from home and is done working at around 5:00-5:30 and is home every night for dinner. Also, my kids are all under 5 so we don't have evening sports or anything during the week so we're usually done with all of our activities (pool, parks, playdates) by around 4:30. 

shouldbworkin

i said 4. I WOH and have 2 kids.  1x a week I go to zumba at 6:15 and the kids go to the gym.  They eat before we go and have a snack when we come home.  I do have to say, though, that it's not gourmet every night.  We do breakfast for dinner and soup and sandwiches a lot!  I really only cook 3-4x a week, weekends included. We also don't have any activities at night right now.  If we did, we'd do the same thing as what we do for zumba nights. 

tmhutch

I answered 5 because we always sit down together to eat, just its not always home cooked, sometimes it is take out.

AndiG

I answered 5.  I SAH which makes it easier to prepare a meal each day - I often use a crock pot or if I can prep things while the kids nap.  My DH gets home late, so we all eat later 6:30 or 7 usually.  On Fridays we usually pick up a pizza so I don't really cook anything, except maybe some edamame as a side for the kids.  I should mention that our meals are nothing fancy, I cook, but not necessarily well.

I would love to continue this for the kids, but I'm sure as they get older and into more evening activities, we will have to eat separately.

eclaires

We only go out to eat once a week, so most weeks, it is 6 nights we sit down to eat together, even if it is leftovers or everyone picked something they want to eat.

I'm a SAHM, we have two kids (ages 4.5 and 9m), and I would say at least 4 out of the 6 nights we do cook, the other 2 are more of a free for all and/or leftovers.  Usually I plan for 5 nights of cooking, one night of leftovers and one night out, but it occasionally gets changed.

ETA: I did mine out of the whole week, b/c it just varies with our schedule since I'm a SAHM.  The work week doesn't make a difference really, so it's hard to say how it would break down.  Leftovers/out to eat/etc. depends on our schedule and what food I've made.  We usually go out to eat on the weekends, but not always.

penguingrrl

I said 5, although lately DH has been very caught up with research so he has worked late more often than usual. I cook every night and at least the girls and I sit down together even if DH is still at work. As a general rule though we sit down together every night for dinner. I'm a SAHM with two kids.

RCH151

4 nights for us right now because my H has golf league one night - but this is for the spring/summer only.  All other times it is 5 nights a week.

buffalo_buckeye

I work pt and we eat at home (almost always together) about 6/7 days a week. Usually our one day is when ds has hockey or soccer so sitting down together is really rushed. Sometimes it will be a weekend. Honestly I would love to eat out 5 days a week but finding healthy options that don't kill our budget that many days is hard.

ghm

6, though we do lunch, not supper since DH works nights. We have 3 kids and I SAH. I clean up after breakfast and start cooking lunch then. I involve the kids if they ask, and otherwise they play in their rooms while I cook. Sometimes I use the tv to entertain them, too.

Me and the kids usually sit down together for supper, but it's almost always leftovers or something really easy. 

CleoKitty

I voted only 2. Right now ds is playing Little League and his games  (usually 3 games/week) tend to take up much of our time. His games usually start in between 5-6 pm. It's usually too early for us to eat before the game and by the time we get home it's getting so late we're starving. We find ourselves ordering a pizza or hitting the grocery store salad bar on the way home. Often we end up coming home and just making a sandwich or find some odds & ends in the fridge to cobble together (cheese, crackers, grapes, salami, etc.)

I will be SO glad when baseball is over for the season. I don't know how parents who have their children in multiple activities ever manage to have time to eat dinner together. 

DandelionMom

I cook and the girls and I eat together every night (even if it is just soup and grilled cheese) but H usually misses a couple dinners a week. 

ETA: I mostly SAH or WAH.  And meals are rarely terribly elaborate.  We'd definitely have take-out or go out to eat often if we didn't have all the food restrictions. 

rebs

I would say 6.  We try to every night.  During his busy season DH will have 3 or 4 evening meetings a week, but he tries to make it home for dinner then go back out. Sitting down as a family is really important to us.  About once a week we go to the grandparents for dinner. 

 We almost never eat out or order in.  We have eaten out once this year, and I can't remember the last time we ordered in.  Mostly we don't b/c I think it is a waste of money, and it is just not that much fun to go out for dinner with 3 little kids. Also I am not a big fan of ordered pizza, I prefer to make my own. I also like to cook, but do have my grilled cheese evenings when I just can't be bothered.

AngelaU1971

We both work full time and aren't home until at least 6:30.  We used to rarely all eat together - - we would feed the kids, put them to bed then eat our dinner once they were in bed.  Now that my kids are getting older, we are trying harder to sit down at the table and all eat together at least a few times per week.  It is definitely not always a great homecooked meal...sometimes we'll just all eat sandwiches or breakfast for dinner or something, but the important thing (to us) is the sitting down all together and eating.

Dougsgirl4ever

My DH BBQ's chicken or fish about 90% of the time, add a salad, corn, potatoes & it makes for easy tasty meals.  If DH didn't cook we would be eating a lot of casseroles because I'm about done by the time I get off work & take the train home.

winomom22

I work 3 evenings a week, but on my evenings off I make dinner and we all sit down together.

ashleyaugust7

My own answer is 2 nights out of the 5 weeknights.  Usually Sunday we all sit together as well at home, so that would 3 out of the week. 

One of my goals with my new job will be 4 out of 5 nights eating together since I will be home much earlier. 

amiamish

I SAH, so generally we are eating dinner together. When I was working I did a lot of casseroles, crockpots, and simply stuff during the week and then the more time consuming stuff on the weekends. I also would make an extra meal or two and throw it in the fridge or freezer for a quick dinner later on.

ashleyaugust7

Here's a good, kind of related piece from the NYT I liked:

Cooking With Dexter: Busy Signal

By PETE WELLS

My father left the office at 5. If he wasn?t home by 5:30, we knew he had hit traffic. To the opening theme of the 6 o?clock news, we sat down to eat the meal my mother prepared.

In later years, like many men of my generation, I learned to cook. This skill has given me far more happy hours than, say, knowing how to change spark plugs. Years ago, it helped impress Susan, the woman I would eventually marry. After my two sons, Dexter and Elliot, came along, I often cooked for them, and later, with them. Two years ago, I started this column with the idea that keeping tabs on the meals prepared by a working father who cooks might add up to some kind of reflection of the way today?s families eat. It hasn?t exactly worked out that way. What has become clear, now that I?m writing the final Cooking With Dexter column, is just how little cooking I?ve done, with or without my 6-year-old.

On Sundays, yes, there have been breakfasts of pancakes and waffles and, just the other morning, green eggs and ham. On Saturdays I?ve shopped for and applied heat to tightly wound purple cabbages, black beans dried last summer, mackerel with tarnished-silver skins.

From Monday morning through Friday night, though, it?s all I can do to get home from the office in time to watch the boys brush their teeth. I did not embark on this column with the idea that it would make me wiser, but I have definitely learned something about cooking for a family at the end of a day spent in an office: It?s very, very hard to do.

These days, those of us with jobs count ourselves lucky, and if we like our jobs and the money we make too, we know we?re even luckier. But that can be hard to keep in mind when riding home after dark, returning one last call or jabbing out the answers to a few more e-mails, hoping there is nobody reading on the other end who will lob the exchange back at you. There will be more of this before you fall into bed, more in the dark if you are the restless type, and just before breakfast it will begin again.

In some circles, it has become kind of cool lately to talk about those of us who don?t manage to cook for our families as an abstract but urgent societal problem. We are the people who don?t have time to cook or ? I particularly enjoy this phrasing ? the people who say they don?t have time to cook. Because of us, society is coming unglued. Our children are eating processed foods and fast foods, and it?s making them fat and sick.

Those who worry about this problem have a number of proposed solutions to ?get people cooking again.? I?ve got one of my own: a federal law that requires everybody to leave work at 5, as my father did. I?d vote for that. But then because somebody has to put dinner on the table by 5:30 or 6, you?d need another law that would prohibit more than one parent per family from working full time. I wouldn?t vote for that, even if it did get Americans back in the kitchen.

What I?ve learned in the past two years is that when people say they?re too busy to cook, it isn?t like when they tell their doctors they exercise three, maybe four times a week. They mean it: they?re too busy to cook, or at least too busy to cook dinner every night of the week before the children go to bed. Since the golden age of home cooking ? if there ever was such a time ? parents work more. And more parents work. If you add up the hours worked by all the adults in the average American household, the change is profound, epochal. In many families, there is nobody around to do housework of any kind, including buying and preparing food.

If you enjoy cooking, this might strike you as a tragic turn of history. But if you don?t, the proposition that we have to get people cooking again makes as much sense as arguing that wives need to go back to ironing their husbands? shirts.

Even for me, there have been times over the past few years when cooking felt like drudgery. My lowest moments in the kitchen have come when the boys were long past the point of needing food, right now, and I was insistently plowing forward with some from-scratch meal. They would be garroting each other under the table, I would be beating an egg with a fork, dipping a sole fillet into it, then rolling the fish in bread crumbs (fresh! homemade!) and slipping it into the cast iron skillet. There?s yellow police tape at the front door, the detectives are on their knees drawing chalk outlines on the floor and I?m at the stove, reminding myself that sauter means ?to jump.?

On nights like that, what I probably needed was something edible that I could transfer from the freezer to the microwave to the table quickly. After all, there?s nothing wrong with processed food. The problem is bad processed food. Instead of cajoling people to get ?back? into the kitchen and shaming them into avoiding processed foods, it might be more helpful to work on turning out proc­essed foods and fast foods that taste like more than just salt and grease and that don?t make kids fat and sick.

Without question, I also needed something more traditional: a wife. Susan holds the family together. She works, but not in an office, so she can steal time from herself to take care of the boys. While I am still swinging at e-mails in the batter?s box of my cubicle each night, she feeds them. While I am looking around for a clean shirt in the morning, she packs Dexter?s lunchbox. When I think that in the early days of our romance I wooed her by cooking, it?s hard to escape the conclusion that she is the victim of one of the greatest bait-and-switch schemes of all time.

Because the children eat so early, she and I have dinner after they go to bed. Usually, this is my turn to cook, while she has a glass of wine. This arrangement works only because she has already done the shopping. Like a television chef, I walk into a fully stocked kitchen.

Late last month, we had a few people ? adults ? over for dinner. I made Susan?s favorite dish, spaghetti and meatballs. I even bought all the ingredients, down to the fresh oregano and the bacon. Now, I have issues with spaghetti and meatballs. To me, they?re two separate dishes. But to Susan, they are indivisible. And so we ate them the way I did when I was a boy, a big swirl of pasta with the meatballs riding on top. It wasn?t much, but it was my birthday gift for the woman who was cooking for Dexter while I was only writing about it.

grja

i work full time out of the office and i typically cook all 5 nights. We'll order take out if i'm being lazy or have a late meeting, but i'm usually home by 4 so its not a big deal. We try to save ordering out for the weekends.

We do always try to sit down and eat together. Thats important to us. Luckily we can do this since our kids aren't in afterschool activities yet (ages 2 and 4). Sometimes if dh will be home late, i feed the kids first and then they have dessert or a snack while we eat dinner.

 

dnagal

ashleyaugust7:

Here's a good, kind of related piece from the NYT I liked:

Cooking With Dexter: Busy Signal

By PETE WELLS

 Thanks for posting that!  I loved it!   

AZ_Erica

I am a SAHM with 2 kids and I would say "most" weeks we prepare and sit down for dinner 5 nights.  We will often order in on weekends or so out. 

tammy79

I pretty much cook every night, it's easier to cook at home instead of taking the kids out, most nights it's me and the kids, dh dies a lot of evening shifts, but I also think that will change once school start and after school activiies starts.

Jamaica_Bride

I said 5 but it's more like 6-7. We both work full time out of the house.

Usually Friday nights are pizza!

Jodi&Joe

I answered 5 (and that's out of 7).  We normally eat almost all dinners together now that my shift has changed.  When I wasn't getting home until 7, the kids would have usually already ate.  I would say at that point, it was 3/4 out of 7.  Actually, I can't think of a dinner we haven't ate together in a real long time (whether that be take out, home cooked or eat out).

At any rate, this is one of those things that I think is great to start now but is really not ultra important until the kids are school aged.  So this would be the first year that I think it was pretty important to make sure we ate together.  It's kind of like church is for me -- I think religion/faith is great.  But what's MORE important is that it's one hour of every week that is devoted to behaving and family time.  I used to tell my MIL that I didn't care if we spent that hour at a park bench every Sunday -- that it wasn't so much the "God died on the cross for us" stuff that was important.  It was that there are consequences in life, and that there is a need to have that routine and structure.  That it is GOOD to have something every week that, no matter what is going on with life and how crazy it gets, that you are going to spend one hour as a family unit.  Together.  No TV, no electronics, no phone - have to act proper, etc.  THAT is what is important.

And so back to the dinner thing -- it's important to have that quality time, as a family, every day.  It's not about WHAT you are eating....it's about a time to interact with each other, talk, etc.  Again, routine and structure and time together.  Where there are some manners at play and everyone is engaged.  No TV, electronics, phones, etc.  (although in my house, more times than not, Joey and Cam are at the bar stools with the TV on and Joe and I are at the table discussing our days!  We need to really work on having them at the table with us.  And soon -- they are growing up WAY too fast!)!!!! 

AggieCouple

We don't go out much anymore, not with 3 kids.  The kid friendly places usually mean not the healthiest food. So I try to cook on days we aren't eating with my parents (once a week) or with one of my sibs (about once a week during the summer).  But the latter usually means I'm cooking at least some of it.  On Fridays, we do really easy stuff, like burgers and hot dogs, as it's movie night and we eat in front of a boardgame and then TV.

We very rarely order out, unless I'm super tired or the day just got too crazy.

ETA: I'm a PT WAHM.  Right now, I'm on a self-imposed maternity leave.

jlw2505

I listed 3 which is what it averages out to be.  DH and I both work Full Time.  Year round, the kids have swim class once a week so we eat out that night - either sandwiches that we make or we stop at Panera across from class.  This past winter, the girls had gymnastics another night so that was the same type of deal for dinner.  We aim to make dinner at home 3-4 nights a week but do typically end up eating out or doing some activity at least one of those nights that keeps us out (this week we are going to the firestation open house so will grab dinner out before we head over just to save some time.