I forgot

The kids made us dinner last night. JJ and I went to swim our laps because the kids asked us not to come in the house because they were doing some Christmas stuff. I found this out while grocery shopping because Patty called me and asked me to come over and see her, when I told her that, although I miss her and would love to see her, this was not in the schedule of the evening. She told me to stay away from home. Helene called Patty to get me out of the way.

At any rate, JJ and I went to the pool alone. When we came home the kids had transformed the sunroom by dimming all but the Christmas lights (the tree resides in the sunroom) and had about 10 candles adding to the ambiance. The table was set in good china, lots of good silverware, beautiful wine glasses complete with white wine to start, and a bottle of red for after. It was beautiful. They really know how to set the stage. We are going to work on the food in the new year... For dinner we were to start with cream of mushroom soup, but they didn't read the instructions and tried to serve it to us in the concentrated version, albeit warmed. We graciously told them that we really didn't need a soup course.

For the main course there were steamed vegetables, just a little lukewarm, due to the fact that Helene had prepared this repast for 7:15 and we didn't come home until after 8. The veggies were accompanied by morningstar farms sausage - not my favorite, not even something I would eat. I had a lot of veggies.

Then we had a cheese course, where there was some awesome saint Andre with beautiful whole grain bread. Can you tell that this was my favorite course? All of this was followed up by the three "servers" joining us for dessert. Dessert was a buche de noel provided by Chris (our babysitter) and his girlfriend, Chelsea (I am assuming the chef). Chris was heading home to the UK for Christmas and this was his gift to us. It was beautiful and good.

JJ and I felt truly blessed to have such an evening and we are going to encourage the kids to make this a regular event. We will help them with recipes and shopping (trying to get the actual cuisine part on par with the presentation and service) and we will enjoy our 'at home date nights'. It was awesome.

Happy thoughts.