"We Need More Cereal Bowls!..."

strange title for a post, but my sister will get a kick out of it (inside joke!)


This is my man's china pattern ( I know..... more dishes!).  His parents gave each of the four children an eight piece place setting a long time ago, and it  sat packed in boxes for years before I met him.

We busted it out for his birthday dinner this year (you can read about our Sunday Night Suppers here).  A good time was had by all!

But the strange thing....

there aren't any bowls... cereal or otherwise!  We have 2 large platters, bread and salad plates, cups & saucers, but no bowls!  Strange...

I'll have to look the pattern up on Replacements, Ltd to get the scoop... If you've never used them, this is a great resource for pricing and finding missing pieces to any amount of china patterns.  New and old, alike, and of course... for bowls!

Linking to...

The exception to the Sunday night dinner rule...

When your living room looks like this...

'cause all of your furniture is in the dining room (yes, that's a couch blocking the doorway), sitting down at the table is not an option.

This is where we eat dinner every other night of the week...

At the kitchen bar... and if the camera had been turned just a hair more to the right, you'd see the other half of my living room laying around.

Hopefully the carpets will dry quickly and we can start moving some of the stuff back in!  Hope you all had a great weekend!

Sunday Night Suppers....

We eat dinner at the dining room table on Sunday nights...complete with china, silver, and bottle of wine and a nice meal ("with three things on the plate" as my best friend would say... but that's a joke for another day).  In a house full of men this may seem kinda strange, but...

For my man's birthday two years ago, the kids and I surprised him (he'd been out of town the week prior and was just getting back late that afternoon).

The boys polished the silver, I cleaned the china (it gets dusty from neglect, even in the cabinet!) and we set the table, lit the candles, turned off the TVs (yes... that's plural- everyone seems to want to watch something different!) and sat down to eat as a family.  A wonderful meal and actual conversation that went beyond ("huh?" & "nope").

We must have sat at the table for almost two hours just hangin' out.  Nobody jumped from the table to get back to whatever they were doing (or watching).  And miracle of all, my two sons spent more than 5 minutes in the same room without arguing.  Heaven, I tell ya'!

I can't remember what we talked about, but what I do remember is the men folk (all three) looking at me and asking me why we never used the room.  Sad but true... and I didn't have an answer...How crazy is it to work so hard to make something so inviting, filled with things you love, and forget to include the people you love most of all?

But the most surprising thing?  From that point forward, we have eaten dinner together at the table (sans TV, but with some pretty hip rock 'n roll in the background... and a mean game of "name that tune"!) nearly every Sunday night since. Stranger still?  My "boys" are actually 14 and 15 year old "young men" and they are the ones who look forward to it the most!

Last weekend we were out of town and the boys stayed with friends.  When we got back on Monday afternoon, Davis was the first one to ask me if we were going to have "Sunday night dinner tonight, since we missed it yesterday"

Gotta' Love It!

Linking to...

Between Naps on the Porch...