Mealtime Memories

While meals may not seem newsworthy or even scrapbook-worthy, think about this: we all eat approximately 3 meals a day, 365 days a year. In your lifetime, that could be well over 80,000 meals. Surely you will have some mealtime memories that deserve a place in your scrapbooks. Here are some ideas to help you incorporate your family's mealtime traditions into your scrapbooks:

• Recipes - Make a recipe scrapbook with your favorite recipes. This would be nice for your own kitchen, or something you can pass along to your children as they head off to college or get married.
• Stories about Recipes - Sometimes a recipe is special not because of the taste of the food, but because of the recipe's origin. The first time I met my husband's family down in Mississippi, both of his sisters fixed the same chicken recipe for us (two nights in a row). That same recipe, which was his mother's originally, is now one that we eat on a regular basis too.
• Favorite Foods or Least-Favorite Foods - This topic could fill several albums in my household. It seems that I can never make a meal that all six of us will eat. Documenting this could be really fun. Imagine the chart showing the likes and dislikes of each family member's palate.
• Favorite Restaurants - We all eat out on occasion…some of us more than others. Do you have a favorite restaurant you visit on a weekly or monthly basis? Do you always eat at the Chinese buffet on Easter Sunday?
• Seating Arrangements - If your family is like mine, you all have your own special chair at the dinner table. It may never have been "assigned" to you, but you always sit there. My dad would always sit at the head of the table, and at a restaurant, he would want to have a view of the kitchen.
• Blessings - If your family always says grace or a blessing before each meal, document it and its story if it has one. We sing a blessing that my oldest son learned in preschool when he was just 3. When the kids were smaller and we sang the "Amen" at the end, they would say "Awww Man!" That's something that I don't want to forget.
• Mealtime Chores - Who sets the table and cleans it off after a meal in your house? Is it a privilege or a punishment? What about loading or unloading the dishwasher? Along the same lines - who does the cooking?
• Kitchen Décor Through the Years - I recently borrowed (okay, stole) my mom's old photo albums from 1974-1980. I had the best time looking at the pictures and especially seeing the kitchen wallpaper as it changed over the years in the background of many pictures.
• Memorable Moments - While looking through those same albums, I did not find any pictures of myself sleeping in my mashed potatoes. That doesn't stop my family from telling that story year after year.
• Biggest Blunder - While these moments might be downright embarrassing or even frightening at the time, we can usually learn to laugh at ourselves in time. Think about those charcoal cakes, dried-up turkeys, rock-hard brownies, the blender that spit milkshake clear up to the ceiling, or the time your neighbors called the fire department when they saw all the smoke!

If you don't have any of these mealtime memories documented on film yet, grab that camera on your way into the kitchen…bon appetit!

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