Family Dinner

In our family Mike does most of the cooking, and even 2 nights a week his mom is nice enough to send us home with a prepared meal. I get home now around 3:30pm, and I try to get something done around the house; dishes, laundry, take the garbage out, pump milk for Rowan and/or I will tend to Rowan if she is awake. On very rare occasions if both the kids are sleeping, I will try to get a nap in. Mike usually gets home around 6-6:30pm and I'm usually trying to feed Liam at this time as well. Then he gets play time sometime around 7pm, and then we try to get him in bed by 8pm. At this time, Mike goes downstairs and prepares our meal and we usually eat around 9pm. We really would like to start eating as a family, but we are just unsure how we can pull off having dinner ready around 6 o'clock when Liam is needing to eat? Yesterday for example, which by the way was Sunday, we attempted to have a family dinner and it turned out to be a complete disaster! I don't even remember when Mike started cooking, I think it was around 6 pm, Rowan was sleeping and I took Liam outside to entertain him. All he wants to do is run in the backyard, but unfortunately he also likes to run on the concrete patio which makes me very nervous, so I took him on a walk. Then we went on another very long walk in the stroller, and by then I needed to kill another 30 minutes, so I took him in the backyard again...unfortunately, this is when he fell in the garden onto some dead weeds. He cried for a bit, I checked his hands, and he seemed OK. We got the bubble machine out, and shortly after is when I noticed his shin was all scratched up, and once he noticed it as well is when it started to really hurt him. By this time dinner was ready, so we cleaned up his boo-boo and put some neosporin on, but he was a wreck by this time, and didn't want to sit down for dinner. Partly, I think he was really tired, and partly he was in pain. So, I plated up dinner and we ate in the playroom. Having kids you just need to adjust your plans around them, and improvise, but I just find it so sad that the one time we really try to have dinner as a family, it blows up in our face! I often wonder just how other families that have two working parents do it?! I guess we will have to keep trying and improvising.