I had one of those “ah ha!” moments this week. I noticed that when I get up from meals, Alexander, our 2-year-old, tends to wander away as well. Obvious, right? But somehow it just made sense this week.

It might be that Alexander is growing more and more independent. He’s sleeping in a “big boy” bed now and learning to play on his own. So it makes sense that he’ll decide to get up from the table when he wants to. He’ll also follow our lead. If he feels like there’s fun to be had at the table, he’ll stay. So our job is to stay put as a family and eat a meal.

That’s easier said than done, of course. Our big meal together as a family tends to be breakfast, and that’s inevitably rushed. Unfortunately, I usually get home too late for dinner. This probably gets into the debate over “equally shared parenting” that Lois Solomon wrote about earlier this week. I’d love to give my kids the kind of fun, conversation-filled dinners I had growing up. But newspapers have a way of eating into evening hours. So perhaps I’ll try to set a start time for breakfast to avoid the coming and going. We’ll see if it works.

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