This last week, we’ve enjoyed the most wonderful of stays at Bluestone Wales, which if you’ve never heard of it before – it’s like the Welsh version of Center Parcs. I’ll be blogging all about it very soon but before then, I wanted to write a little something for this week’s The Ordinary Moments link up because I’ve missed the past few weeks. Whilst we are away, I absolutely loved eating as a family at the dinner table. LPD and I made ourselves a big pot of tea every morning, and we all sat down to eat breakfast together and it was honestly the most relaxing and heart warming way to start each day.

Family Dinner Table at Breakfast Bluestone Wales

Apologies for the grainest photo known to mankind, but turns out Bluestone lodges don’t have the best light for photography (especially when you’re an amateur like me!) but I love it all the same.

Embarrassingly, it’s not something we do very often at home because our table is either a) topped full of junk and unusable or b) tucked away in the corner and it’s too much effort to move it out or c) a mixture of the two. We don’t have a large living space in our house – we don’t have a separate dining room and our lounge is quite narrow making it unsuitable for having the dinner table pulled out all the time. We usually end up feeding Pickle first, and then scoffing our food whilst sat on the sofa once he’s gone to bed… but I’ve always felt weird about it. It’s such a little thing, but I think eating together at a table is so important. It’s something I remember being a big part of my own childhood – a constant feature of daily life that made sure at least for thirty minutes of every day that we were together as one family, sharing our day. As Pickle gets older, I want him to think that’s normal and whilst he’s been a baby I’ve been able to let it slide but now that we’re verging on him being a veritable toddler, I want that to change. As soon as we got home, I couldn’t help thinking of ways that we might be able to shift the furniture around to make our dining table a bit more usable.

I tried to envision turning our whole lounge around, trying to work out if our sofas would fit anywhere else or maybe we could get rid of one sofa and just have one when… bingo, I sussed it. If we kept the table where it is but rotated it 90 degrees, there’d be enough room to have it ‘out’ all the time with space on the end for Pickle’s highchair, and it wouldn’t take that much effort either! Brilliant. We had a big tidy up (as the place looked like we’d been burgled before we went away, never mind when we got back and unpacked the car!) and tested out my theory and boom – perfect.

Our first family dinner in our own home was fajitas. LPD and I enjoyed it greatly but typically, Pickle was ridiculously overtired after a nap-free afternoon and looked at his dinner with disgust before purposefully throwing it, piece by piece, on the floor and having a whinge. Ahh, family dinners. I doubt they’ll ever be the idealised vision I have in my head but I’m already looking forward to long weekend breakfasts, big family roasts and to finally having this time together every day.

The Ordinary Moments