In response to our “Most Embarrassing Dinner Habit” contest, we received some wonderfully funny and honest submissions. They ranged from watching movies while eating, to serving up fast food, to finding wads of meat beneath your children’s plates.

Thank you so much for sharing your stories! We thoroughly enjoyed reading them, and could definitely sympathize with many of these habits. In fact, we’ve even examined similar habits in our recent blog posts. For example, in her post about picky eaters, Dr. Anne Fishel gives advice on how to encourage kids to try new foods. And this Family Blog post by a reader named Kim contains several interesting meal-planning ideas.

But now for the contest winner! (Drum roll, please!) After careful deliberation, we decided that an entry about “gross-out” dinner conversation took the contest cake. As Laura describes, during dinner, each member of her family shares the grossest story from their day.

Embarrassing? Sure. But it’s a great example of how using unique conversation starters can get kids talking. Congratulations to Laura, who will be receiving a $100 supermarket gift card!

We’ll announce our next contest next week, so definitely be on the look out. In the meantime, please enjoy Laura’s winning entry:

“I would like to preface this entry by noting that our embarrassing dinner habit started out with really good intentions.  To encourage family communication a few years back, we started having our children tell us something interesting about their day at dinner time.  

We used a round table format and each of us (hubby and I included) would mention something that happened or something we saw/read/etc.  Somehow, this has morphed into telling the grossest story you can.  Topics range from school friends who can get milk through their nose on command (okay—truth moment—so can my oldest daughter) to someone’s gory injury to anything my husband has seen at work (he works in the wastewater industry – enough said). 

The kids love it, and occasionally someone from the “under 12” friend pool is allowed to participate…but we don’t really talk about family dinner with any friends we want to keep.”