Empty nesters, do you eat at a table?

For dinner (non special occasions) we always eat in the kitchen at the table, and we almost always eat together.
If we are having “fancy breakfast” (not often), we also eat in the kitchen, together.
We usually eat holiday meals in the dining room, at the same time, and use the fancy dishes and glasses.
Breakfast and lunch are wherever, whenever.
When kids lived at home, they were only allowed to have food/drinks on tile floor space, which is only in our kitchen and front hall/entry-way. One kid had a bad habit of spilling (on computer while in bed for example), leaving gross stuff in bedroom trash can, etc.

Our girls were never allowed to eat in their bedrooms. D2 has roommates that eat in their bedroom and she finds that gross. To this day she still doesn’t eat in her bedroom even though she is out of the house!

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I’d say we are 50/50. It depends on the meal. A not-messy meal will often be in front of the TV. And none of us, including our kids, would EVER eat in the bedroom, barring illness or the very occasional breakfast in bed treat.

The dining room is used regularly, but rarely (almost never) for just me and hubby.

I’ll admit it - we eat dinner in front of the tv. But we do eat together. We have never been formal lunch people; we each make whatever we want for lunch & eat it when we’re hungry. We don’t eat lunch together. Breakfast is another meal we do “on our own.” I always work out when I get up, and I eat my daily steel cut oats after I shower. H eats toast or a bagel while I am working out. For all I know, he might sometimes eat standing up in the kitchen … but I doubt it.

When the kids were home, we always ate together at the kitchen table. We have a small table in the kitchen, so we eat in the dining room when the kids/spouse/GD/GF eat with us. It’s always a joke, though, because we have a small dining room. It’s really narrow, and once you’re seated, you’re pretty much stuck for the duration.

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When the kids lived at home, we always had dinner at a table. Then the empty nest phase came and we still ate at a table, never in front of a TV.

Now, I am single and I don’t regularly eat at a table because there is nobody to talk to. I don’t watch TV. I eat at my desk with my laptop. In summer, I’m trying to sometimes eat at the table on my patio. If anyone comes over to eat, we eat at a table.

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I cook dinner for my husband and he sits at our barstools and I clean up and make my dinner as he eats. Then I go and eat alone. Except for special meals I eat alone. When I’m talking to people I lose track of what I’m eating and overeat or feel unsatisfied. I read or watch tv while eating by myself. I know for a lot of people that’s when “ mindless” eating happens. Not for me. I enjoy every bite. It’s when I’m with others that the eating is mindless. I started doing this though only after the kids were out of the house. It’s how I lost and kept off 75 pounds.

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Dining room table–80% of the time. The other 20% of the time we’re at kitchen island (using the stools around the island). My husband is a news junky, so we’re probably watching MSNBC. When the weather co-operates we’ll eat outside at the table on our deck. We have a Mosquito Magnet on a lower deck and that’s what allows us to eat outside. If we didn’t have that, the mosquitos would carry us away.

We eat at the kitchen table together (there’s a TV). We finished re-watching The Sopranos and are now re-watching (new for me, not for H) Game of Thrones. Also watch L&O, NCIS and Star Trek. We did this with the kids, too. Lots of conversation, and they learned to request a lawyer. :wink: Our dogs were named for strong female characters in the shows we watched.

When the weather’s nice, and when H had Covid recently, we ate out on the screened porch. The table is eight feet long, so it’s great if we have guests. Kind of wish the table was smaller, though, so we’d have room for casual seating. Would be nice to install windows that close, too, as we get a ton of dirt and pollen all over everything out there during the winter/spring.

We don’t have counters in our kitchen where we could put chairs and eat. We have a separate dining room that flows directly into the living room; we seldom use it for eating. H dumps all of his junk on that table, so it would take serious excavation to clear it. (It’s a sore spot. I refuse to clean it up.)

We do breakfast together on the weekends, but during the week I grab a sausage muffin as I’m out running errands. We do lunch separately – H grabs something in between calls when he’s WFH, I tend to make lunch my main meal, so will get a salad if I’m out or make something protein-dense at home.

We’re definitely table folks!

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The NYC dining table has been in mothballs since COVID-19. No TV before 6PM generally but I confess to having breakfast and lunch on a kitchen counter where the laptop is on constantly. Dinner is squarely in front of the television usually on a tray.

This is a surprisingly interesting thread. We still have one of our three at home and dinner often isn’t all three. But we eat all lunches and dinners at the dining table. Dinner almost always together but not lunch. We are often home from work at the same time but don’t eat lunch at the same time. I don’t think we’ve eaten in front of the tv more than 3x in 20 years in our house, but we don’t really watch much tv anyway.

Another question related to this thread is do you eat the same thing? In the past I or spouse made dinner and everyone ate it. Now often spouse and kid will eat one thing and I will have something else.

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I always eat breakfast on a stool at the kitchen peninsula. On a good day I read the print NYT. On a bad day (about 40%of the time so far in 2022) I have to read it online. Usually my husband eats breakfast before I get up. He eats lunch at home, I take mine to work. Dinner may be separate or together but it’s rarely at the dining room table because that table is actually a sewing table most of the time.

We eat at the kitchen table (but we have a TV in that nook too, which is sometimes on if there’s an important game going on). I love our kitchen table, but it only seats 4 (we’ve squeezed 5). Now that I have a son-in-law and younger daughter has a long-term boyfriend that’s a frequent dinner guest, we’ve had to relocate to the dining room when everyone is here (we do Sunday dinners with everyone). I have an open concept home, so my dining room isn’t a closed, separate room - and it’s not set up to be a formal room.

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The house we raised our son in had a dining table in the open living room (see my lost battle above), a large eat-in kitchen with an island and separate table. We always ate together at the kitchen table, no TV or electronic devices allowed, and we always ate the same meal. I’m not preparing separate meals for anyone, and you may not have your eyes on a screen while you eat.

In this house as empty nesters, DH and I eat at the kitchen island together and, again, the same meal which we’ve usually prepared together although, now, the occasional iPad is OK. I’ve gone soft in my old age.

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We have always eaten the same meals.

The only change is lunch. H is now working from home a few days/week and he likes a big lunch. I eat something small so we decided we’d each be responsible for making our own lunches and then we eat together.

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We generally eat the same dinner though lots of things I make I can tailor to the person’s preference. No onions for you, no barbecue sauce for you, etc. breakfast is always on our own. Most lunches we are on our own except Saturdays.

We don’t watch tv when we eat but we are a phone family. But, we usually talk about what we are reading on our phones generating discussions. We don’t sit in silence.

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I’ll admit we eat in front of the t.v., and it’s wonderful :joy: after sitting at a desk for 9-10 hours or working on stuff all day, the last thing we want to do is sit in an uncomfortable chair and immediately go into a discussion of our day, so we use that time to decompress. After dinner we go to the pool or go on a golf cart ride, then on a walk with the dog. We honestly enjoy the 30 minutes of silence during dinner. We talk during our other activities throughout the evening.

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Speaking of eating dinner while watching TV, when I was growing up, if we were awake, my parents had the TV on. No exceptions. It was on when we were talking, studying, eating, everything. When we checked into a hotel, the TV was turned on immediately. And that was back when there were only three channels to watch! It was quite revealing when I got married and my husband didn’t want the TV on constantly! So different.

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I would rather have a tv on then someone at the table on their phone. :slight_smile: That annoys me unless the phone is being used for a quick answer back to someone or to look something up that pertains to a dinner discussion.

Most of the time we eat the same food? I did Meatless Mondays for about 18 months and H wasn’t all about that so I would either make him extra of something on Sunday or remind him Monday morning that he would need to figure out something to eat that night.
I’m a more adventurous eater so while the base meal may be the same I will often add more elements to mine - make it more spicy, add more vegetables, etc.

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We mostly eat at the kitchen table, which is in the family room. We often have the TV on to news or Jeopardy!. We enjoy watching Jeopardy together. However, we don’t always eat together since I still go to the office several times a week and like to exercise before eating or have something to do that gets me home late. With nice weather, we also sometimes eat at the outdoor table on our deck. My DH is mostly retired (has a morning “retirement” job) and so does a lot of the cooking.

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We’re empty nesters and longtime retirees. We eat most of our meals in front of the tv in the family room.

For years we didn’t watch a lot of tv to the point we wouldn’t get a lot of pop culture references. Right now we’re working our way through Call the Midwife…LOVE it!! (Yeah, not exactly pop culture…lol)

It might sound defensive but when the kids lived under our roof we usually ate together at our sunroom table or the kitchen island, unless there was a “big game” on tv. We do love our sports!

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