We’re in that awkward period now where the kids are starting to prefer finger foods to the puréed baby foods, but they can’t eat what we eat yet. We’ve been preparing some soft finger foods for them like cubes of boiled potato, cheese, green beans, avocado, banana, and sweet potato. Trying to do this during the week is difficult. As I described in my “Day in the Life” blog entry, we have a whole routine of chores that we do after we put them to bed and after we prepare dinner for the two of us. Now, we have to add “preparing their food” to that whole routine.
I suppose that once they can eat what we eat, we can set aside some leftovers from dinner for the kids to eat the next day. I’ve decided to liberalize Miranda’s diet a little so that she can start to have a diet that’s more similar to ours. Not being able eat onions and tomatoes eliminates a suprising number of adult foods. We’re still avoiding large amounts of wheat for her though, and that cuts out pasta unfortunately. I know there’s non-wheat pasta out there, but Bernard and I are hesitant to try that ourselves. It just sounds gross.
At some point, we’ll be eating dinner as a family, but that means once we get home from picking them up from daycare (around 6 pm), we have to make dinner while watching them, eat, bathe them, do bedtime bottles all before 7:30 pm. How is this possible? I’m considering digging out our old crockpot, so that we can prepare stuff the night before, throw it in the crockpot in the morning, and hopefully, we’ll have dinner waiting for us once we get home. We welcome suggestions from other working parents out there.
You’re forgetting the phase when they WON’T eat what you eat!
Hmm, that one hadn’t occurred to me. I guess we’ll be making separate food for them longer than I thought.
hmmm… that’s a tall order. can one parent can’t be home a bit earlier first to make dinner and the other parent pick them up from daycare. i’ve made some baby food for lucas and i made it less soft (the rice) as time went on. it’s a big concoction of things mixed together. i make a lot at once and freeze it so i just thaw it as i need it. he ate that and some table food that he could chew. then he went from that to table food (in tiny pieces). the other thing you could do is make a whole week’s meal on sunday, either freeze them or refrigerate and warm them up as needed. you can half cook the food so it won’t be all overcooked when you heat it. i know it’s not ideal but it may work if no one can prepare dinner early.