The Wright Place: Do You Suppose They'll Want Dinner?

We began the day hustling out the door, some of us school books in hand, others of us cookbooks, one of us a hockey stick and one of us a Hello Kitty purse loaded down with a sticky shiny collection of lip gloss.

Our time at the park included a bit of basketball, scootering, castle building and sand arranging, street hockey, science and a smidge of math.

We drove home with TobyMac's new album providing the background music which wasn't exactly in the background but rather was rattling the windows of the minivan. The four children seated 'round me in the car were belting out lyrics which were only a little louder than reports of growling bellies.

Home at last, we all lit upon the fridge and emptied it of all leftovers after which Molly, lucky duck, left us to take her nap and Kate joined me for a bit of porch learnin' while Cole and Meg held down the fort inside with their own studies.

Kate and I were just about to begin our last subject of the day, when Molly fresh from sleep found us and decided that I did indeed look able enough to read a chapter of Charlotte's Web and hold her on my lap while scratching her eternally itchy back. The chapter ended with Charlotte and Wilbur the pig wishing each other the kindest of goodnights over and over and I gotta say, I was a bit envious of the pig.

School over for Kate, art class to begin for Molly...insisted Molly. I made a palatte of the colors requested and added a few extra to encourage total opportunities for creativity. Pouring perfect little puddles of color on my good dinner plate, I grinned thinking that the mini-artiste would deeply appreciate my efforts. "Did I ask you for yeyyo?" "I did not ask for yeyyo."

The temperamental artist created this...

"It's yo wedding picture. Dat's Daddy in da brown and you wiff da face thingy. I'm sorry I didn't make you as corr-ect-yy as you are." Correctly pronounced in the slow, careful syllables of a child who often unleashes a too-big-for-her word that her brain understands but her tongue can't yet perform. "That's lovely," I said from the bottom of the basement stairs where I'd run for a moment to see to some impatient laundry.

Somewhere along the way I read a recipe that suggested tossing some lovely tomatoes into the oven to roast slowly for 5 hours at 275˚, but I didn't have a whole five hours and the recipe was for larger tomatoes and I turned the oven up a bit higher than the recipe instructed and so I ended up with very tasty, if a bit overly roasted, tomatoes.

They'll be great in just the right recipe I'm sure, but exactly which recipe I'm unsure. I'm also unsure where this day went. I had so much to get done and none of it necessarily involved roasting tomatoes.

Now I sit typing and listening to two little girls squeal in the background and an energetic boy throwing a ball against the house outside and another young girl shuffling the remainders of her school papers. I'm trying to disappear into the scenery because shortly someone is going to realize that they don't smell dinner cooking and they don't hear dishes clinking and soon I'm going to have to treat with reality the question I've been ignoring all day... What's for dinner?

Maybe they'll stay busy enough not to remember dinner. Maybe we can just skip it tonight?
Cause, I'm pretty sure I don't have dinner prep in me. I left that piece of gumption somewhere between the hockey game and Charlotte's Web. I wanna read a book that doesn't involve talking animals, just for a bit. I wanna sit on the porch and gaze lovingly at the long shadows that promise fall. I wanna eat sushi.

Surely they don't want dinner.

Do you suppose they'll want dinner?

Um...yes.

Does a pan of almost burnt roasted tomatoes and garlic count as dinner?