pits and peaks.

I was feeling miserable stuck in my nasty head cold this afternoon with absolutely THE shortest fuse ever and hungry to boot, on my way home from picking up the girls from basketball practice that ran 20 minutes later than it should have, and running through the grocery store at 5pm grabbing things we forgot earlier.

How’s that for a run on sentence?
I was tired and cranky for sure!

But I came home to dinner cooking and smelling delicious thanks to Mr. Man, took a minute to decompress and then up the stairs came the call “dinners ready!” We went through the typical plea from the 5 year old about the juice he would rather have then milk and dished everyone up. We all sat down to dinner and then, without prompting, my 5 year old says-“who’s going first?”

Let me backtrack for a minute…one night I was watching a fascinating, brilliant, thought provoking documentary on TV about a close knit family talking about what made them so close…ok…fine…I was watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians…a reality show about people who are famous for…well..be famous…but they WERE talking about dinner table conversations growing up. In their house, every day at dinner, they took turns telling each other about the pit and the peak of their day. So one day I thought I would try it on for size in our house. We do eat dinner together every night of the week and I thought this may be a good way to encourage more conversation than the usual “school was boring”, “I have too much homework”, etc. So for the last couple months we’ve been sharing our pits and peaks of the day-all of us-not just the kids.

Now. The kids have been away for a week and tonight was the first weeknight we were all at the table again. And the 5 year old prompts us about our pits and peaks. Awesome.

So they all take turns, there are lots of pits and peaks, none very drastic, some cute and clever and a kindergarten argument with his arch enemy Ashely about who said which bad word (which by the way was “peace out sucker” I know. It’s shocking the language these kids bust out!)

And I’m last.
And I think for a second.

My pit is that I woke up with an insane cough and a raw sore throat.

But my peak was homemade Chicken Pot Pie, sitting around the table with the people I love the most, talking about everyone’s day.

Thank you Kim Kardashian.
You have improved my parenting!

Go figure.

Post-Script Update:

This blog post was originally written in 2009. Said 5 year old is about to turn 15 and is essentially a ginormous man child growing more rapidly than my leg hair during the reveal in a Queer Eye episode. And more often than not there are only three or four of us at the dinner table on any given night. But now we have our littlest, our caboose, our CocoLoco who anxiously awaits us all at the table just so she can get us started with our pits and peaks of the day.

Some habits never die.

I’m pretty stoked this one stuck.
#ThanksKimK