It's been three years or so since our "Thursday" Dinners with our dear friends and their son have actually been held on a Thursday, but we have continued the tradition of a weekly dinner night. It started in March of 2005, where we gathered for the first time to watch the pilot of the American Office and eat homemade lo mein at A and B's apartment. A tradition was immediately born, and we started rotating dinner and Office nights. In six years two homes were purchased, four new jobs started, two children born and many, many vegetarian meals and bottles of wine consumed.
These dinners ground our week. No matter what we have going on, whether it's a big project at work, or the birth of a new child, we always know we'll have a dinner with friends to look forward to. (We actually did not stop weekly dinners even when A and I each gave birth. I went into labor on a Friday, was out of the hospital the following Wednesday, and we hosted weekly dinner on Thursday!) Our sons are the best little buddies, and now that we're parents, these dinners are punctuated with little boy giggles and the occasional tantrum. With the boys running about, we don't have time to watch TV together anymore, but we still gather to try new recipes and sample different beers and wines.
It's traditions like these that I'm so happy to have, and that I never had growing up, where we moved every four years or so. To be able to look back and remember eating off TV trays before A and B had a dining room in their new townhome, the first meal I cooked in our condo's kitchen, how A announced she was pregnant during dessert on our night, and how A and B brought baked pasta to our house and came to hold newborn S (while I enjoyed my first post-pregnancy glass of wine) makes me feel so much more connected to the place I call home. There is such value in that history. Our boys will hopefully someday remember eating things like this and playing trucks together as kids.
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