Montessori and Meatloaf

I can't promise that each night's dinner will match so well to the day's activity, but I might consider that as a goal--should both of my children stop requiring nearly constant attention and endless sunscreening in this crazy sunshine-ridden paradise.

Let's start with dinner. Honestly, it is my anchor. If not for dinner, I think I might just hang it up. It gives me a sense of purpose, peacefulness, creation. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. How comforting is that? Accomplishing a decent dinner can give you such a sense of completeness and closure. And there are good dinners, quick dinners, easy dinners, healthy dinners, bad dinners, bad-for-you dinners, sinfully-bad-for-you dinners, and a long, savoring-all-night-rich dinners. They are all different, meaningful and important--for your belly, for your soul, and, in my case, for my sanity.

Tonight: Brown Sugar Meatloaf, Smashed Red Potatoes with Garlic and Sour Cream, Buttered Peas and Hawaiian Rolls (ohhh...They are good. If you haven't tried them you should). Hearty, stick to your ribs dinner for this evening. I am selfishly trying to get Dave (my husband) home for lunches to break up the day.

He likes old-fashion comfort food. I used to stick-up my nose to those kinds of dinners. I was a meatloaf snob, I suppose, I thought it was beneath me. But like all tried-and-true things, you have to wonder why people like it so much and what it's all about. I would like to take credit for lowering my standards to cook it, but truth is I subscribed to a free-sample of a weekly dinner newsletter where they give you four meals and the shopping list. Out of sheer laziness for pulling out each meatloaf ingredient, which also seems counter to the whole--shut your brain off tip--I just made the darn thing. And it made my husband incredible happy. So happy that it was a little unsettling at first. I make it when I want something from him. It is pretty transparent, at least to me. But I have no friends right now, so having him home for lunch is a real treat.

I only have boxes. The boxes. The damn, brown, tapey, cryptic, teasing, taunting, bloody boxes. We just moved from Oakland to Carlsbad. We have two children, Gabriel (3-years on July 18) and Phoebe (8 months or so). We had to move for family and for scho