The OTHER hour

Do you know what the opposite of the Me Hour is?  The hour leading up to dinnertime.  Some people call it the witching hour, others the arsenic hour.  Whatever you call it, it's alive and well at our house and about to make me lose. my. mind.  Most afternoons, I find myself rolling in about 4:45 or 5:00 with two tired and hungry kids and one tired and hungry mama.  Since I work in the mornings, I get to spend afternoons out and about with the children.  This is a privilege, I know, and I try to spend this time doing fun things with the children rather than dragging them on yet another trip to Target.  But however enjoyable our afternoon destination has been - a fun playgroup meeting, a workout at the gym for me while the kids play in the childcare room, a visit with friends, or a walk to the park - I start to feel the dread of the dinner hour as we head back towards our house.  I love to cook but even with the best laid dinner plans (menu ready, ingredients prepared, kitchen surfaces at least semi-clean enough to find room to cook on them - and that's of course only on a very well-organized day), I still find cooking dinner with small children around to be highly stressful.  Ella is usually very clingy at this time of day, sometimes literally hanging off my legs, and at her most unwilling to occupy herself.  Dash is just hungry and insistent (i.e. LOUD) and at that miserable toddler phase of eating where he wants only two bites of any one thing and then very dramatically throws the offending third bite onto the floor.  So between trying my hardest to be patient with Ella's endless questions and uncanny knack for being underfoot wherever I go in the kitchen, Dash's massive mess and ear-piercing grunts for things I just don't understand, and oh, yeah, actually trying to cook a decent meal, I am not the bright, cheerful mother I would like to be when we finally sit down to eat dinner together as a family.  I like to think that by eating together as a family I'm protecting my kids from all the terrible things that the research says a family dinner protects against, but I'm not sure whether those analytic models include a factor for a grumpy, short-tempered mother at the table.