WOH Parents - when do you cook and eat dinner?

[Anonymous]

You need to get home earlier. 45 minutes with your baby at night? How much time do you see your kid during the week? Sorry, these are the years to adjust your schedule or step it down a notch. One of you should adjust schedule or you alternate nights to get home by 5:30.

[Anonymous]

Basically we flexed our hours to work after dinner. One of us gets home a little before 5 and starts cooking pre-prepped vegetables, either steaming or stir fry. The protein is also something that can be cooked in 20 min or reheated, such as broiled salmon filets, instapot soup, steamed tofu, etc. The other one is home between 5-5:30. We aim to get the kids in bed between 7-8. Clean up, then work some more.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You need to get home earlier. 45 minutes with your baby at night? How much time do you see your kid during the week? Sorry, these are the years to adjust your schedule or step it down a notch. One of you should adjust schedule or you alternate nights to get home by 5:30.

[Anonymous]

The newborn months are challenging with two, but we prioritize eating as a family. So that meant toddler DD ate with us, and newborn DS nursing sessions were fit around that.

We had pre-prepared meals from nanny, but before nanny cooked we'd pre-prepare on weekends or slow cooker chop at night and throw it in in the morning. That way you can just heat-and-serve when you get home. As your newborn starts solids, they can eat with you as well.

[Anonymous]

This is not a criticism, I promise. Just an explanation to your original question. I do think most people have at least one parent arriving home a lot earlier than 6:45. That is when my husband arrives home but we eat the second he walks in the door, and usually I’ve already fed the kids.

I don’t see how you could eat any earlier with the arrival times you have, unless you eat leftovers or sandwiches and no one wants to do that every night.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is not a criticism, I promise. Just an explanation to your original question. I do think most people have at least one parent arriving home a lot earlier than 6:45. That is when my husband arrives home but we eat the second he walks in the door, and usually I’ve already fed the kids.

I don’t see how you could eat any earlier with the arrival times you have, unless you eat leftovers or sandwiches and no one wants to do that every night.

Particularly in this area--many parents are able to flex their schedules so at least one parent gets off by 5 or 5:30. And most childcare closes at 6 pm, and it's fairly rare to see kids picked up at closing time.

[Anonymous]

Good lord, you have a brain, USE IT,! Cook on weekends and freeze. You can make a meat loaf and cook in muffin tins, freeze, and put in fridge to thaw before you go to work. Salads come already prepared and vegetables come bagged and you cook in microwave. In winter, make a stew, chilli, or hearty soup and freeze in muffin tins.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You need to get home earlier. 45 minutes with your baby at night? How much time do you see your kid during the week? Sorry, these are the years to adjust your schedule or step it down a notch. One of you should adjust schedule or you alternate nights to get home by 5:30.

Why the eye roll? 6:45 is late for working parents of two very young kids. Adjust your schedules or look for more forgiving jobs. That is brutal. DH and I are both home by 5:15 at the latest and are both attorneys. You can absolutely make it work.

[Anonymous]

We all eat at 8pm. Very simple dinners that take 20 mins to throw together, or more complicated dinner that I make during my lunch break on my telework day.

If you cook a nice meal on Sunday with enough for leftovers, there's your Monday dinner! Do something simple for three days in a row, then treat yourself to pizza on Friday.

[Anonymous]

6:45 is late for both parents to be arriving home. What do you both do for a living? Is there any option for one of you to get into the office earlier and arrive home earlier? I get into the office at 8 and leave by 4 so I can pick up my kids at day care and handle the evening activities. My husband handles the morning routine and day care drop off. Most offices are amenable to flexible schedules like this as long as long as you are getting your work done.

[Anonymous]

OP you are only talking about dinner for adults and kids dinner is being taken care by nanny right? When our DC was at home with nanny, one of us would arrive home by 6pm if we wanted to make and eat dinner at home. Otherwise if we were coming later, we would just eat dinner out or bring home takeout. Now that DC is older we all try to be home by 6:30pm to eat dinner together as a family.

[Anonymous]

Where is OP? How did one pp know how old is her older boy? So rude to ask and not follow up.

[Anonymous]

The only people I know who don't eat dinner with their kids are really wealthy parents I used to nanny for. I fed the kids at 5:30 or 6:00 and then the parents came home around 6:30. It all seemed very odd to me especially since many days, both parents met at the gym to workout before coming home together at the same time. Why would they skip eating dinner with their kids every night to workout? I thought it seemed selfish.

[Anonymous]

We ate dinner with our kids at that age, every day and lunches on the weekends too. This is how kids' meals and pickiness are probably created. Plus, kids don't see you eat ever?!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We ate dinner with our kids at that age, every day and lunches on the weekends too. This is how kids' meals and pickiness are probably created. Plus, kids don't see you eat ever?!

I am a PP who eats dinner with my kids and I kind of agree. I'm sure it's not the case for every picky kid but I do wonder about mine. We rarely ate with our older kid -- just fed him ahead of time and ate dinner later ourselves. He took to food very late and had speech delays, so his current pickiness may not be related to our table habits in his early years, but I do regret not having had him with us because it could have helped somewhat. Since his sister was born when he was 3 we have always sat down to family dinner. And she has always been far more willing to eat what she sees us eating (and she too had some speech issues). She goes through phases of only wanting to eat off my plate and i allow it because it means she will try almost anything. She is almost 2.5 and yesterday while helping me unpack groceries, she sampled -- raw and at her own request -- cauliflower, scallions, cherry tomato, and zucchini. And she really wanted to eat the melon rind but I wouldn't let her. By contrast her now 5 year old brother sampled only the cauliflower -- and that was a big step for him; in the past he's refused to try anything and he almost always proclaims he doesn't like it, unless it is cheese or sweets. Yesterday we made a breakthrough of sorts when he admitted to liking white rice for the first time and even ate 2 bites of it. A lot of it has got to be personality-based or in his head, but I see how much more willing he is to try things when he sees us eating them. (Willing being relatively because he's still very negative about it but we're working on trying to have him imagine to himself that he likes it before he puts it in his mouth, and that has helped a tiny bit.)

On the other hand my sister has always fed her kids just in the kitchen, grownups eat later, and the 18 month old also eats anything while the 4 year old doesn't (but is less picky than my son for sure) so -- who knows.