Dinner Bell

Every family needs a dinner bell. It simplifies life a great deal. If you have kids, I'm willing to bet that more than once you have  quietly asked one of them to go tell the others that dinner is ready only to have him turn around and yell, "Dinner's ready!" 

Then you respond by saying the most predictable thing in the world, "If I wanted yelling, I would have done it myself." We've all been there, but there's a better way. Bells have worked for years in school settings. The kids hear the bell and they know what it means. Why can't we use them at home? 

In our family we have a dinner bell. Sort of. Our dinner bell usually rings partway into the meal and it's usually initiated by one of the kids. It would be nice if they rang the bell a little bit earlier, but they're kids and kids don't always do things exactly the way we expect. 

Our bell is different than most. Every night at some point, one of the kids will inevitably drop their fork on the floor. As it chimes its familiar tune, somebody will announce, "There's the dinner bell." Sometimes the bell rings at the start of the meal and sometimes it rings in the middle. Sometimes it's one of the big kids and sometimes it's a little, but it always rings. 

The only time the ringing varies is when the bell-ringer is Ellie, the two-year-old. She's learned that if we give her a real fork, she can stab the table and leave pretty marks on it, so now she gets a dull plastic fork for dinner. When her turn to ring the bell comes around, it really isn't much of a ring at all. It's more of tick/splat, but we give her bell credit anyway. 

I used to get really irritated by the dinner bell, but it has kind of grown on me over the years. Now that I'm used to it, I try as hard as I can to pretend its a fun family tradition, but, try as I may it's hard not to imagine the food that was supposed to be on the fork splattering to the floor as the bell rings. 

I'm thinking maybe we should invest in a real bell that the kids could ring instead. That way whenever they feel that they are about to accidentally drop a fork on the floor, they can instead simply ring the real dinner bell and save the effort of having to clean the floor. Or better yet, maybe I should enter the next King of Wishful Thinking contest. I'd win it every time.