Eating dinner with baby - advice please

[Anonymous]

This may be quite a silly question and something I just need to figure out, but I’m hoping some of you can share your tips.
Now that our baby is about 9 months old, I’m reading that we should all start eating dinner together as a family – But logistically I just don’t see how to do that. For years, my husband and I have just made our own separate dinners, grabbing a salad or soup. We have very different tastes so we’d only make a sit down dinner about twice a month together.

But I’d like to start having a family dinner most nights. However, I get home from work at 6pm, then feed the baby cereal and veggies, then we all go for a walk, then ready for bed and bottle at 7:30pm, then my husband and I get to eat at after 8pm.
There’s no way I can have time to make dinner for all of us in that schedule. And I’d hate to give up the walk. How do people do it?? Plus how do you logistically feed a baby and yourself at the same time? Thanks for any advice!

[Anonymous]

Mother of an 8-mo-old wondering the exact same thing. And I just want to vent - this phase where they are both nursing/bottle feeding and eating solids is a bit annoying. I feel like I have to feed her twice, three times a day.

[Anonymous]

this is easy for us b/c my husband and i eat supper together every single night. we both come home from work around 5:00, go for a run (baby in the jog stroller) separately, then shower and cook dinner. baby is in his high chair at 6:45, being fed by daddy, while mommy puts the finishing touches on supper (and tries to make the next day's baby meals for daycare). it's quite a feat, but it can be done. by the time i serve supper and sit down, it's just 7:00....daddy does clean up.

our problem is baby, at 12 months, is not quite eating table food, but not into baby mush anymore either. it's a real challenge to feed him some days.

good luck!

[Anonymous]

I am home with the kids between 4:30/5pm. If our 9.5 month old is really hungry I give a snack in his chair while I get dinner going or nurse him depending on his last bottle. We usually sit down to eat around 5:45, all 4 of us (H, me, our 5 year old and baby). This is when the baby gets his solids dinner. He is in bed by 7pm so it's imperative we are eating dinner on the early side. H and I always sat down together before kids and we continued that with our first child.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:this is easy for us b/c my husband and i eat supper together every single night. we both come home from work around 5:00, go for a run (baby in the jog stroller) separately, then shower and cook dinner. baby is in his high chair at 6:45, being fed by daddy, while mommy puts the finishing touches on supper (and tries to make the next day's baby meals for daycare). it's quite a feat, but it can be done. by the time i serve supper and sit down, it's just 7:00....daddy does clean up.

our problem is baby, at 12 months, is not quite eating table food, but not into baby mush anymore either. it's a real challenge to feed him some days.

good luck!

What kind of foods do you feed him?

[Anonymous]

Can't offer much advice but we're in the same boat. With commute times around here it's hard to all be home together. I feed the baby first and we eat together really late. If it helps though, my family never ate together (my Dad worked until 9:30PM every night) and we're still really close now. I don't think eating together is necessary for a close family unit, but I do think that you have to work in other areas to make up for the time spent around the dinner table. A lot of families use that as their time to bond and talk, so if you don't have it you have to make sure you're bonding and talking at other times.

[Anonymous]

It sounds like you're making family time in other ways with your daily evening walks together. I don't necessarily think that dinner time is the only way to come together as a family. If your current schedule is working for your family, then I don't think you necessarily need to change them now. I was in the same boat as you when ds was that age. I didnt want to give up the evening time we had together to cook dinner. I preferred to spend it doing something fun with ds. And so I ate after I put him to bed. On the weekends, we all eat together.

[Anonymous]

DS is 16 months and right now he eats dinner before DH and I (who eat after he goes to bed). Logistically with our work schedules it doesn't work to eat all together (DH is often barely home by bedtime) and it is actually hard for me to eat while I am tending to DS (he self feeds, but I seem to be tending to him during his whole supper). During the weekend it is much easier for us to eat as family, so we make a point to do it then. Once DS is older and has a later bedtime it will hopefully be much easier to eat as a family.

[Anonymous]

What kind of foods do you feed him?

it varies. and i would love to hear from others on what works for them.

i'm trying some things off of this website: www.weelicious.com. i rediscovered that my cuisinart hand blender has a chopping function, so i'm chopping steamed chicken, onions and squash (he ate that). i chopped up some barbeque pork with noodles last night and he ate that. but he can like something one night and totally refuse it the next night. he's asserting himself, i guess?

[Anonymous]

OP, your schedule sounds exactly like mine with my son the first year. It's basically because he eats such different meals from us, (usually cut up bits of last nights meal) and he really needs to eat earlier than we can get a meal for the whole family on the table.

Now that DS is 3 and we have a 6 month old, we sometimes eat with him but sometimes feed him separately. I'd say it's 50/50. Usually we eat with him on weekends or when he doesn't seem really tired or hungry already, or when we're having something we can all eat.

I'm anticipating that by elementary school, we'll be more likely to all be having dinner together when possible, because there won't be the food limitations and infant/toddler fussiness at the end of the day.

Esp for families with 2 WOH parents, I think it's tough to eat together. Also for parents where only one person works, that person probably misses some dinners because they are working late or something.

I think of dinner together as one goal but there are others as well. Sounds like your schedule is working now so just go with it. You can change it as the baby gets older and can stay longer at the table, etc.

[Anonymous]

Sometimes it is just me and DD (15 mo.) at the table and if DH can make it home in time than he eats with us too.

As long as DD is watching me (or us -like on weekends) then I think she is understanding how to feed/eat properly. In fact, last week she started using a fork to put ziti in her mouth.

DD (now that she is 12+) gets whatever I'm eating (no food allergies) - salmon, noodles, chicken, beans, macaroni, cheese (LOVES it), boiled carrots, peas, green beans, bread, quishe, etc.

[Anonymous]

Well, my DS is 2.5 and we all rarely eat dinner together.

I pick DS up from daycare at 3:30. He is ready for dinner at 5pm and that's when I feed him. DH comes home around 6:30pm and we both eat together when DS plays or sometimes DS has a few bites of what we are eating. Logistically it is not possible for DS to have his dinner with us at 7pm. He would have knawed off his own arm by then.


I'm not worried about it. We do enough other things as a family and I'm sure when DS gets older and can wait for a later dinner time, he will be joining us.

[Anonymous]

Logistically it is not possible for DS to have his dinner with us at 7pm. He would have knawed off his own arm by then.

my son manages to keep his limbs intact by eating a healthful snack (applesauce, yogurt, bananas, cheese) when he gets home from daycare. then he eats a few bites of whatever mommy and daddy are eating (chopped up) at 6:45-7:00.

[Anonymous]

We all sit down together even if mom and dad aren't eating. We can't always get our dinner on the table at the same time as our kids - we do about 1/2 the time. When I noticed that my kids were sitting in their high chairs (they are 2) while I buzzed around the kitchen/going through mail, I decided that even if I wasn't eating, we were all going to sit together and talk/sing/interact.

Our schedule:
5:45 we get home (kids home with nanny)
6-6:30 kids get a bath - (they are always really dirty from the playground) One parents cooks while the other bathes.
6:30-7 we eat
7-7:45 playtime/wind down time
7:45 kids upstairs for bed

We ask our nanny to give them a snack around 3:30 to help curb hunger.

[Anonymous]

OP, this is a wonderful question and you are smart to be thinking about it now, even at this young age, as Baby can definitely benefit from table interaction.

There are some good suggestions on the practical logistics in other posts. I would just add that this is actually an easy time for you to work with Baby's schedule because s/he can -- really --- eat and sleep at any time of the day/ night. It's all a matter of training the schedule. (As opposed to, say, the kindergarten years when children really do need to be in bed at an early hour.) So make the dinner eating schedule work for both you and your DH (sounds like you need to work together to find something that works for both of you) and plan Baby's schedule to fit. If Baby doesn't eat until 8:00 or 9:00 at night, that's fine... as long as s/he's had snacks throughout the day and isn't hungry. Same thing with bedtime. The important thing is the time that you spend together, eating as a family -- it doesn't really matter when it is.