Family Dinners

Life is busy and it just seems to get busier and busier the bigger your family gets.  Pesty Melanie here, and sometimes it's really hard to find time to all sit down together as a family for dinner, but it's so great to make that time to spend together.  We try to have a family dinner together every night -- sometimes it's sandwiches and chips on the sidelines of a soccer game, but at least we're spending time together.  When we're sitting around the table at home, I want the conversation to be a bit more than the usual...
"How was your day?"
"Good."
"Did anything exciting happen?"
"Nope."
"Did you learn anything?"
"Yeah."
"What did you learn?"
"I don't know."

You would think with a house full of girls, conversation wouldn't be a challenge for us, but I've still had to figure out ways to get my kids talking at dinner.  My kids' favorite dinnertime conversation is 'Family Quiz.'  We ask a question like "What is Lauren's favorite school subject?"  Everyone guesses what they think Lauren's favorite subject might be and then Lauren tells us the answer.  They love having everyone guess things about them and guessing things about each other.  Sometimes everyone knows the answer and they love that, too!

Another one we love is to choose a question or a topic and go around the table giving everyone a turn to tell us something.  These are some of the topics we use:
-Tell us something funny that happened today.
-What were you afraid of today and what did you do about it?
-What did you do today that was nice?
-How did you help someone today?
-What was the best part of your day?
-What was the worst part of your day?
-Tell us how you tried to be a good friend today.

These kind of questions get my kids to open up a little more and I get to find out a little more about what's going on in their lives while they're away from home. This makes family dinner time a part of the day that we all look forward to, a time when we can reconnect and share what happened in the time when we were apart.  What do you do to get family members talking?  How do you make dinnertime special?  With your busy life and hectic family schedule, how do you make time to spend together as a family?