It’s cold outside, so I thought a nice oven dinner would be good. I’ve always liked oven dinners, because you just throw it all into the oven and time it so everything’s done at once.

Then you remove it all from the oven, set it on the table, and everybody sits down and digs in, and it’s so cold outside, and so warm inside from the oven being on for a couple of hours, and the hot food is so good, and all is well.

In a perfect world.

Zappa is visiting again this weekend, and he has never liked oven dinners. So after I removed all the pans from the oven and set them on the table, I made a pizza for Zappa and put it in the oven. We waited for it to bake before we all sat down, which meant the au gratin potatoes had to be reheated in the microwave.

But in the long run, my son was home, and he wanted to sit and eat with us. He just didn’t want any part of our fogie meal oven dinner. It was okay.

Some people’s sons won’t sit at the table with them under any circumstances, so I’ll take my seven-foot baby son any way I can get him.

I have a feeling that Hub was eyeing that pizza with more interest than he had in his own dinner, but maybe it was just my imagination.

Whatever. I liked it.

Item: when the kids were little and lived here, they had two choices for dinner: take it or leave it. Now that they have grown up and moved out, I have relaxed that rule and will usually fix them anything they want, when they are visiting.

Do I love them more now than I did then? No. It’s just that my children are already raised, and I don’t have to do the ‘rule’ thing any more with minor issues like dinner. I think sometimes that some people forget that, and are still trying to ‘raise’ their grown kids.

Oh, I still give advice. It’s seldom taken, but I still give it. And sometimes I find myself crossing over the ‘meddlesome’ line, but I try to catch it before it becomes TOO annoying. I am still vitally interested in every aspect of their lives, but I try not to be intrusive. I mean, there are things MY mother still doesn’t know about ME, and don’t you tell her, either.

I have a horror of being one of “THOSE” mothers. You know, the ones where ‘mother’ is just one part of a compound noun?

Anyway. Whatever. Come on over for dinner. If you don’t like what we’re having, speak up. I’ll fix something else just for you. And count your blessings, because ten years ago, I think I would have told even a guest what their only two choices were. And I have a feeling that I probably did.