Eating with single children

My wonderful husband was recently at a conference for work, and throughout the week, I noticed something strange happening to the dinners my son and I shared. To start, they went faster - we ended up eating leftovers several times throughout the week so that I didn't have to cook as often. I also broke out more games to play at the table (maybe I was trying to distract us from missing my husband). Finally, they seemed slightly more boring, as I was trying to cater to my son's tastes that week.

When my husband returned, I made a dish that he and I enjoy, but my son does not. (Our son had an alternative option that night.) All of this made me wonder if we should be thinking about our dinner choices more.

I did an exercise a few years ago in which I made 100 new-to-us recipes and added the dishes that we all liked to our meal planning. There were not a lot of them that got added, but it did open up some possibilities for us. Most of the dishes that we added were pretty healthy.

And that last piece of information is important, because families with single children tend to make less healthy eating decisions. There's no specific reasons why that seems to be the case, but I know that I have a tendency to spoil my only child a bit, and I could see how that would easily get out of control with food.

I guess all of this is just another reason for me to review my son's caloric intake over the given week - looking at the total of the meals he gets at both home and school and to make sure we are introducing new foods wherever we can. (Sometimes he is open to it; sometimes he is not.)

What tricks do you have to keep your dinners healthy? Share with me in the comments.