Playing Games At Dinner | yucktoyum.com

Dinner Games A newish friend of mine recently had a new baby and I found out her husband was going to be out for dinner and rather than having to deal with a newborn and two kids for the dinner and bath routine on her own I invited her to dinner.

I decided to use the opportunity to trial paella, a new recipe I was adapting for this blog. Somehow, during my prep my son got out a tin of chickpeas (they’re one of his favourite foods, weird I know and he won’t eat hummus!!) and asked for them to be added. Who was I to argue.

As Brie Boy and Baby Bell were playing with their friends it wasn’t the time to get them to help with dinner preparation. I decided to serve the paella in a fun shape and got out a shaped mini cake tins which I brought from a kitchen shop and to involve the kids I asked what shape they wanted their dinner to be.

Sometimes when friends eat together without realizing it they encourage each other to eat but tonight it was not the case.

I presented the paella in the chosen shape with prawns on top, my friends kids ate the prawns but then stopped. The sight of chick peas and peas put them off and they weren’t going any further. Their mum told them that there was chicken and sausage in the paella and they ate a couple of pieces of this but I could tell it was going to be hard work to encourage them to eat anymore.

I started playing my daughter’s favourite dinner game, ‘Is there a mouse in the house’ with my friends daughter to get her eat a bit more and she loved the game. I then tried her brother and he was also receptive. Of course my children also wanted to join in and I played the game with all 4 kids. With the boys I changed the game for them and played ‘Bites’ as it was more age appropriate. 10-15 minutes later dinner was finished and they were asking for dessert. There was not one complaint from anyone about having to eat chick peas and green peas.

My friend was amazed, she had never seen her kids respond to eating their greens that quickly. I think she will jump at the next invitation and will certainly be playing games with her kids over dinner.

Do you play games over dinner with your kids or do you think that dinner is not the time to play games?