Eating dinner with baby - advice please

[Anonymous]

P.S. As far as feeding both of you at the same time... try, "a bite for you, a bite for me!"

[Anonymous]

We've always eaten together. The key is finding food that is quick to cook. I work part time, so three days a week I'm home with the kids by about 6:15. DH gets home around the same time. Typically, he takes the kids and plays with them while I throw something together. I try to make a lot more than we can eat so that there are leftovers for the next work day. It doesn't usually take any more time to make a double batch than it does a single batch. I grew up in a meat-potato-veggie house (really, protein, starch, veggie), and that's how I cook. I buy a lot of the pre-cooked/frozen chicken. Pasta is pretty quick, as are most types of rice. The only way I cook veggies is in the microwave. I just nuke the kids a bit more so they are softer. I can usually have dinner on the table within 20-25 minutes or so--sometimes quicker. No, we don't get the more elaborate meals we did before the kids were born, so we let restaurants cook those for us when we go out to eat. And we do eat more kid-friendly foods (like mac n cheese, or tortellini) than we did before we had kids. BUT, the kids also see us eat the veggies and protein, and they eat it too. They are 1 and 3 now, but they have been eating with us ever since they could sit in a high chair; as soon as they could eat solids, they just had more chopped up/soft versions of what we eat.

Oh, and on the days I don't work, I try to cook food that takes longer to cook (beef tenderloin, something in the crock pot, whatever), or I manage to think to pull something out of the freezer.

Both DH and I were raised in families where everyone sat down to eat together, so this was really important to us. Also, in our situation, because I have a couple "extra" days home with the kids that DH doens't have, the time he gets to spend with the kids alone while I cook is something he really appreciates.

[Anonymous]

"she/he can -- really --- eat and sleep at any time of the day/ night. It's all a matter of training the schedule....same thing with bedtime"

While maybe this is true for your kids, it's certainly not true for my DD. She's evolved (of her own making) into 2 naps that happen at pretty defined intervals and bedtime happens within a 30 minute range each night for about 6 months now. She's just tired by that time. If we kept her up later, she's just grumpy/over-tired and she'll still wake up at the same in the morning. Some kids do have internal clocks and you have to work with their schedule needs, even if it doesn't fit your schedule ideally.