Dealing with family dinner every day for the rest of your life!

[Anonymous]

Have only read the OP thus far, but ugh! In fact, I told DH just last night that I cannot wait until I can start making dinners that I want to eat vs. having to care so much about what everyone else wants.

In my defense, for years I enjoyed cooking and preparing my kid's lunch box, making sure there were healthy and tasty meals 3x/day. My kid loved everything I made for him/us.

Then middle school kicked in and the complaints started. (i know this is a teen thing - I did the same thing!) But he'd say: I'm not taking a lunch box to school; everyone orders from the school cafeteria. Yuck, but ok, at least he gets 2 decent meals/day. Then at dinner, came this: Why do we have the same thing all the time? Oh, I was over at Johnny's house and they had THE BEST dinner. Why don't we ever have anything here to eat? (not true). Covid happened and we started ordering out a lot.

High school comes, and now he doesn't want to order out but wants meals cooked again. But, I am so over the complaints and dissatisfaction with whatever we come up with for dinner. I say we because I have handed the dinner responsibility over to DH now. Sometimes I feel guilty but mostly I do not.

When I do cook though, I hate it because DH works late and DS is busy with after school stuff, weekend sports and I loathe cooking alone. Or find myself spending an hour or so with dinner and then they come home and say, oh, i already ate. Wasted hours cooking. And did I mention the kid will not eat leftovers? Or, if I don't cook when he's out because I think DS may be eating elsewhere, he'll come home, open the fridge, sigh and say, Where's the dinner?

Sorry for the rant - I am so over the dinner thing and though I'll miss him when he goes to college I am looking forward to having soup and salad (or something similarly easy) every night and that will be fine for Dh & me!

[Anonymous]

Hello fresh

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Have only read the OP thus far, but ugh! In fact, I told DH just last night that I cannot wait until I can start making dinners that I want to eat vs. having to care so much about what everyone else wants.

In my defense, for years I enjoyed cooking and preparing my kid's lunch box, making sure there were healthy and tasty meals 3x/day. My kid loved everything I made for him/us.

Then middle school kicked in and the complaints started. (i know this is a teen thing - I did the same thing!) But he'd say: I'm not taking a lunch box to school; everyone orders from the school cafeteria. Yuck, but ok, at least he gets 2 decent meals/day. Then at dinner, came this: Why do we have the same thing all the time? Oh, I was over at Johnny's house and they had THE BEST dinner. Why don't we ever have anything here to eat? (not true). Covid happened and we started ordering out a lot.

High school comes, and now he doesn't want to order out but wants meals cooked again. But, I am so over the complaints and dissatisfaction with whatever we come up with for dinner. I say we because I have handed the dinner responsibility over to DH now. Sometimes I feel guilty but mostly I do not.

When I do cook though, I hate it because DH works late and DS is busy with after school stuff, weekend sports and I loathe cooking alone. Or find myself spending an hour or so with dinner and then they come home and say, oh, i already ate. Wasted hours cooking. And did I mention the kid will not eat leftovers? Or, if I don't cook when he's out because I think DS may be eating elsewhere, he'll come home, open the fridge, sigh and say, Where's the dinner?

Sorry for the rant - I am so over the dinner thing and though I'll miss him when he goes to college I am looking forward to having soup and salad (or something similarly easy) every night and that will be fine for Dh & me!

PP here again. Please skip over my rant. I thought this was a post about complaining teens.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Have only read the OP thus far, but ugh! In fact, I told DH just last night that I cannot wait until I can start making dinners that I want to eat vs. having to care so much about what everyone else wants.

In my defense, for years I enjoyed cooking and preparing my kid's lunch box, making sure there were healthy and tasty meals 3x/day. My kid loved everything I made for him/us.

Then middle school kicked in and the complaints started. (i know this is a teen thing - I did the same thing!) But he'd say: I'm not taking a lunch box to school; everyone orders from the school cafeteria. Yuck, but ok, at least he gets 2 decent meals/day. Then at dinner, came this: Why do we have the same thing all the time? Oh, I was over at Johnny's house and they had THE BEST dinner. Why don't we ever have anything here to eat? (not true). Covid happened and we started ordering out a lot.

High school comes, and now he doesn't want to order out but wants meals cooked again. But, I am so over the complaints and dissatisfaction with whatever we come up with for dinner. I say we because I have handed the dinner responsibility over to DH now. Sometimes I feel guilty but mostly I do not.

When I do cook though, I hate it because DH works late and DS is busy with after school stuff, weekend sports and I loathe cooking alone. Or find myself spending an hour or so with dinner and then they come home and say, oh, i already ate. Wasted hours cooking. And did I mention the kid will not eat leftovers? Or, if I don't cook when he's out because I think DS may be eating elsewhere, he'll come home, open the fridge, sigh and say, Where's the dinner?

Sorry for the rant - I am so over the dinner thing and though I'll miss him when he goes to college I am looking forward to having soup and salad (or something similarly easy) every night and that will be fine for Dh & me!

PP here again. Please skip over my rant. I thought this was a post about complaining teens.

I mean..sounded applicable to me. Part of loathing cooking dinner is teen complaints or just generally not really wanting to eat what I want make. So finding the balance of making dinner to please everyone is
Hard

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Delegate. Is there a significant other? They need to be in charge of dinner at least two or three nights a week. Are the kids 7 or older? Each one who is needs to cook one night a week.

Also, some families plan the weeks' dinners together, so everyone has input and understands it might not be their choice one night but it will be another night.

This.

Why live with a status quo that makes you miserable?

If everyone eats, then everyone cooks.

(The kids will be glad you gave them this skill, when they are older. Expect a learning curve though, of course.)

[Anonymous]

I just...choose not to.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:To make you feel a bit better, I have to deal with this not only for dinner. I am the only parent, working, and have 2 teenagers boys (MS and HS) who eats alot! And they won’t eat school meal, they demand real meal for their lunch box. So I juggle at 5.30 am to prepare, and do it again for dinner, and do it again for lunch time if there are no school.

Demand?

Please course correct so they do not grow into monster husbands.

Either assign them dinner one day a week or lunch 3 days a week.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Career nanny here. This is what I have done for all my nanny families (and a few friends who are busy moms):

1) Come up with a list of 18 meals your family at least sort of likes. This is 6 meals a week plus one day of leftovers or takeout.

I like to break it down by day so like every Sunday is something I have to bake in the oven, every Monday is a crock pot meal, Tuesday soup/salad, Wednesday sheet pan dinner, Thursday pasta, Friday stir fry, something like that.

You now have a Week 1 menu, Week 2 menu and Week 3 menu.

2) Write out a shopping list for ingredients for each week. Depending on how often you like to shop, break it into two lists (Sun-Tuesday and Wed-Friday for example).

Going forward shop according to the list and make whatever is on the list for that night. Your family in never eating any particular meal more than on e every 21 days so you can do this for years and nobody will because absolutely bored of a specific food.

That is not the magical formula for freedom from the kitchen you think it is. Almost every meal in that rotation is an hour or more of work, if you add up planning, shopping, chopping, cleanup. It's just a variation on "get up earlier in the morning."
OP wasn't just asking for menu inspiration. She's too busy not to burn the broccoli. A 21 meal rotation doesn't solve that.

Here's what would actually help:
A list of supermarket/delivered microwavable meals that are edible, healthy enough and don't require loading the dishwasher at the end of the night.
A list of homemade freezer meals that you can make months in advance (Meal prep every Sunday? No thanks).
Helping the mom find ways to delegate to everyone around her that is over 10 years old!!! She shouldn't bear that burden alone.

Monday: teenager's famous pasta
Tuesday: tween's scrumptious salad kit
Wednesday: hubby's whatever
Thursday: TJ frozen something
Friday: chili you batch made 4 months ago and put in the deep freezer, with a quart bag of rice you also batch cooked and put in the deep freezer.
Saturday: hubby's other whatever.
Sunday: take out.

That can be the baseline. Actual mom cooking is only offered when there is a lull in her other responsibilities.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To make you feel a bit better, I have to deal with this not only for dinner. I am the only parent, working, and have 2 teenagers boys (MS and HS) who eats alot! And they won’t eat school meal, they demand real meal for their lunch box. So I juggle at 5.30 am to prepare, and do it again for dinner, and do it again for lunch time if there are no school.

Demand?

Please course correct so they do not grow into monster husbands.

Either assign them dinner one day a week or lunch 3 days a week.

Yeah they are like 6” tall and growing and involved in many school activities, sometimes they have afterschool till 8pm. They are in constant hungry. School meal is not satisfied them, and nor if I sent them just sandwich.

[Anonymous]

At this point, I am so incredibly bored with cooking the same meals yet again that will be acceptable to the whole family. The boredom is just unbelievably intense, but the cooking needs to get done - by me.

To get my brain oriented, and make it so I am less likely to end with the distracted "burned the broccoli and overcooked the pasta" situation, I focus using a few minutes of video before heading to the kitchen. I pull up Youtube or whatever and search for the dish I am making, to watch someone EXCITED to be making that dish. I am not following the recipe, but this is about getting my brain and my emotions ready to cook the same thing I have done a million times before. Watching the video will force-pivot my mind away from whatever I would like to actually be thinking about.

I still hate the chore, but the trick helps.

[Anonymous]

Pp again, I usually put protein shake, protein bar, banana/ orange and snack, they can bag their own for this, but the meal I still have to make it ( Such as Philly cheese steak, meatball sandwich, spaghetti, wraps, buritto, fried rice and such)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:At least they pretended to like it, OP!

This!
At one point, there will be just the two of you, or just you.

My kids didn’t care if they had the same meal three times/week. Even now, spaghetti with meat and Rao is a winner.
Do like Germans: cold cuts, cheese, bread, tomatoes, pickles.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How do you deal with this as a full time working mom? Everyone looks to you for dinner. No one ever likes what you make. You don’t have room in your brain to decide on dinner every single night. Tonight I was so distracted with work issues, didn’t have time to make a decent dinner, burned the broccoli and overcooked the pasta. Everyone looking at me pretending to like it. Major fail. I wish we could afford a personal chef. Someone take this off my plate!

Then there's lunch.
So lunch + dinner = 14 "meals" a week
Times 50 weeks in a year (2 weeks off: vacations, eat at at others', parties, work related etc..)
That's at least 700 "meals" a year.
Times 18 years of age until kid is an adult = over 12,000 "meals" while living with you.
Good luck.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How do you deal with this as a full time working mom? Everyone looks to you for dinner. No one ever likes what you make. You don’t have room in your brain to decide on dinner every single night. Tonight I was so distracted with work issues, didn’t have time to make a decent dinner, burned the broccoli and overcooked the pasta. Everyone looking at me pretending to like it. Major fail. I wish we could afford a personal chef. Someone take this off my plate!

Looks like you made a bad choice in you husband. Mine does about 75% of the cooking. Too bad. #Momfail

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How do you deal with this as a full time working mom? Everyone looks to you for dinner. No one ever likes what you make. You don’t have room in your brain to decide on dinner every single night. Tonight I was so distracted with work issues, didn’t have time to make a decent dinner, burned the broccoli and overcooked the pasta. Everyone looking at me pretending to like it. Major fail. I wish we could afford a personal chef. Someone take this off my plate!

Then there's lunch.
So lunch + dinner = 14 "meals" a week
Times 50 weeks in a year (2 weeks off: vacations, eat at at others', parties, work related etc..)
That's at least 700 "meals" a year.
Times 18 years of age until kid is an adult = over 12,000 "meals" while living with you.
Good luck.

If your isn't making her/himself lunch by the time they are 10 years old, you have failed as a parent.