The end of the day can be just as exhausting, and you can be a real hero if you handle dinner.
For instance, define whether Mom and/or Dad will handle dinner, homework and bedtime or if the responsibilities are a regular part of the nanny's role.
So let your parent handle dinner, and go on drink duty (while listening to some holiday jams to get in the mood!) with one of these sure-to-impress but deceptively easy recipes.
Now they share household chores, with her husband, a university lecturer, in charge of making breakfast and sending their daughter to school, while Mrs. Fukushima handles dinner and bedtime.
So, not money, not age, not wildly differing lifestyles: my house is also full of people, but my forks have plastic handles, dinner is at the kitchen table and consists of whatever is in the fridge, and on some Saturday mornings we're all of us – boys included – slumped brokenly in front of the full English.
Near the main house are one of Merle's old touring buses, which has been converted into a mobile recording-and-video studio, and a pair of parking lots large enough to handle the dinner rush at a popular steak house.
The bright yellow front door, for example, measures 11 feet; the door handle is dinner-plate-size.
Darren McGrady, a former chef to the royal family for 15 years, said the palace kitchens are better equipped to handle formal dinners for about 150 people, like the one the queen will give for President Barack Obama in May.
They've done it all (I'll leave myself out of it for the moment); Gone to college, worked outside the home, worked inside the home, managed teams, managed soccer schedules, handled business dinners, planned family menus, covered sick days, handled sick children, weathered job loss, weathered divorce, endured HR reviews, endured custody battles, built businesses, built new lives.
And the restaurant management handled our cold dinner perfectly, apologizing and asking us to come back again later, on the house, and refusing to let us pay for the meal.
"Porta Pottis at fancy benefit events really make me angry," added Ms. Jaffe, who once had a toilet handle broken at a dinner party.
