Rosenstrach - How to celebrate everything: recipes and rituals for birthdays, holidays, family dinners, and every day in between

How to Celebrate Everything

Dinner: The Playbook

Dinner: A Love Story

Babies crave routines.

This is what the pediatrician told my husband, Andy, and me on a winter day in 2002, one week after I gave birth to our first daughter, Phoebe. We were unshowered and exhausted, running primarily on new-baby adrenaline, but thirteen years later I can hear those words as though he were standing right in front of me. If I were making a movie of my parenting life, it would be the scene thats revisited throughout the film, fuzzy, sepia-tinted, maybe even in slow motion.

Of course, to a rookie mom and dad, who mightve paid a small fortune just to sleep for two straight hours, the concept of a routine seemed laughable. (At that point, the concept of ever watching another twenty-four-minute episode of The Larry Sanders Show seemed laughable.) But sure enough, it wasnt long before wed regained the semblance of a schedule: Id nurse the baby every three hours; shed take two naps, a long one in the morning and a short one in the afternoon. Before bedtime, thered be a rousing rendition of Shell Be Comin Round the Mountain from our Music Together CD, followed by a story in the rocking chair, and a final round of nursing. (Or, as Andy used to call it, The Knockout Blow.) As soon as Phoebe was safely down for the count, wed pour ourselves a glass of wine and (ahhh) make dinner.

I dont mean to suggest those early days were perfect pictures of order and calmquite the opposite, in fact, especially after her sister, Abby, showed up twenty months later, bent on upending all notions of twenty-first-century civilized living. But feeding, sleeping, making dinner, sacrificing any shred of dignity in the name of eliciting a gigglethose were the main dots to connect in the course of our days with babies and, later, with toddlers. It was rarely a straight line from one dot to the next, and it rarely resulted in a pretty picture, but the dots were our guides, our goals. Without them, without the routine, there was nothing preventing us from descending into a state of chaos.