A toddler, a night shift and no appetite

Started 7 June 2026 · 13 replies · 90 hearts · read 1.5k times

CarlMiddlesbrough, UK · 7 June 2026

1 month ago

Starting a thread on this because it keeps coming up in ones and twos: A toddler, a night shift and no appetite

Anyone else navigating this? I feel as though every piece of advice I read was written for someone with a completely different week.

The social side of this is harder for me than any of the logistics, and I have not found anywhere else where that is discussed practically.

I have a plan for the ordinary weeks and no plan at all for the unusual ones, and the unusual ones are where everything has gone wrong.

If anybody has an arrangement that works and is willing to write it out, I would be very grateful.

PoppyLeeds, UK

What surprised me was how much my patience improved once the tiredness lifted, and how much of parenting is just having enough patience.

PipBristol, UK

My weekends are the difficult ones because the structure is gone, and I have had to build a very loose one deliberately.

WrenFacilitatorLeeds, UK

I am pleased with this thread. Practical, kind, no instructions, no comparisons. That is the whole brief.

OrphBath, UK

The birthday cake question comes up in this circle every few months, and the answer that works for me is to have a piece and say nothing.

SindriReykjavík, IS

Wren — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

What I got wrong was trying to keep everything exactly as it was during the hardest fortnight. Something had to give and it should not have been me.

6me too 6

NualaArmagh, NI

Something practical: my medication lives somewhere the children cannot reach and everybody in the house knows where and why.

ZenBristol, UK

I have made a point of never describing food as good or bad in front of them, and this circle is where I learned to notice that I had been.

IslaOban, UK

Reading Nuala, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

My experience is that the logistics settled at about six months and everything since has been ordinary parenting, which is difficult enough on its own.

TasnimBradford, UK

Read, understood, and glad you are here.

OrvalWinnipeg, CA

#10

What Zen described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

Cooking for a household while my own appetite had gone somewhere else was the practical problem nobody had prepared me for.

6me too 2

BobbieRochdale, UK

#11

The lunchbox negotiation and my own appetite were unrelated problems and I kept accidentally treating them as one.

WrenFacilitatorLeeds, UK

#12

I want to say that a genuinely new practical idea is rarer than it sounds after two years of these threads. If you have an arrangement nobody has mentioned, it is worth the post even if it seems obvious to you.

GillyWorcester, UK

#13

What helped was letting standards drop for a season. Three months of very simple food and nobody suffered and I recovered.