First things first, I would really like to know who came up with the term Blended Family. The reason I ask, and excuse me for my bluntness, but it truly is a horrible word, given the context at hand. Let me explain why. A blender is a kitchen appliance or those things that bars used to have prior to the wonderful slushy machines and like most people, whether they are divorced or not, I have a blender. It’s a nice blender, with blue liquid in it so you can actually put it into the freezer prior to use and it is supposed to keep your blended concoctions colder longer. Now that I think about it, I have yet to use it in that manner. I guess the next time I am having a summer get together on the patio; I will have to give it a try. But that would require a patio. Anyway, I use my blender for blending, plain and simple. Fancy that. My blender has sharp metal blades at the bottom and it takes whatever you put into in it and makes it, for lack of a better word, blended. For Heaven’s sake, it chops ice and has a puree button! I use my blender to make smoothies or milkshakes for the kids and margaritas or other delightful libations for myself and other adults. So, and please this is metaphorically speaking, the last thing I need is for someone to take this literally and then I end up in a legal battle, if I take my current family, my three daughters, and blend them together with my new family, and voila, I get a brand new mixture that if, like other blended items, does not taste good, gets poured down the disposal, which then in turns blends with whatever happens to have been in the sink. Now here is where my hospitality background comes in handy, if food is not presented in such a way that makes it look appetizing, it probably won’t be, no matter how wonderfully delicious it truly is. If I were to take my new family of nine and blend them all together, it would look and taste terrible; once again this is metaphorically speaking. You can’t do it. It can’t be done. Give up. I guess I shouldn’t say can’t, so I will say that it is highly unlikely that it will work in this manner. We are all different. No matter how many are in your new family or how much everyone loves each other, it will be next to impossible to blend everyone together and make it look and taste wonderful. We are humans and our natural reaction is to reject that which we do not know. And these episodes of rejection can be regarding the simplest things, if I have had taco nights on Tuesdays, but my new family is used to having spaghetti on Tuesdays, then what, spaghetti in taco shells. Perhaps a meatball taco or Mexican spaghetti would be better. My proposal is to change BLENDED to FOLDED. Say it again, folded. See how soft that is. Feel the difference between BLENDED and folded. A folded family is so much nicer than a blended family. Think about the word, when you fold a piece of clothing, you neatly align it so it fits nicely in a drawer, with the overall goal to reduce wrinkles. You know that some clothing stores actually show their employees the correct way to fold. I want to show my children the correct way to fold, all seven of them. Currently, folding to them is taking off their clothes, and whether or not they are dirty, shoving them back into the drawer, on a good day. It is then my job, and her’s, to periodically go through the drawers and start the hand me down process and neatly fold everything back into the drawers of the next child. As another example of folding, recipes will ask you to gently fold one ingredient into another. The process here is not to bruise or over blend. You are looking to create layers. You are creating volume. You are trying to make the flavor more powerful and robust. You don’t want to mash everyone into the same thing; it’s not a gelatin mold. We want to create a new dish by adding layers of flavor and gently folding everyone in together. Hey, instead of having garlic bread with our spaghetti, how about some layered nachos. So this is my suggestion to all of the professionals out there, beginning right now, let’s change the way we think about step families and throw out the blender and pureed liquefied mess that comes with it and let’s start folding. Let’s start layering our families into one nicely folded family. Come on. Everyone let’s start folding together. I guess not everyone, but almost everyone as there are a ton of divorces.