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My children are old enough to google and they have

Started 24 April 2025 · 11 replies · 108 hearts · read 2k times

NanNeath, UK · 24 April 2025
about a year ago

Starting a thread on this because it keeps coming up in ones and twos: My children are old enough to google and they have

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

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.

I would like to know what other people say when asked, because my current answer is too long and invites more questions.

Every piece of advice I read appears to have been written for somebody with a completely different week from mine, so I am asking people whose weeks look like this.

I will come back and say what I settled on, in case it is useful to the next person asking this.

36

CarlMiddlesbrough, UK
#1

I have found that eating something at four in the afternoon means I can sit at the table at six and be present rather than negotiating.

8me too 3

BexPlymouth, UK
#2

Picking up Carl’s point rather than starting a new one.

Somebody suggested keeping something easy in the freezer for the evenings I have nothing, and it has saved me perhaps thirty difficult nights.

8

BobbieRochdale, UK
#3

Bex has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

The thing I would say to a new parent here is that this is genuinely harder with small children and you are not doing it badly.

11

WrenFacilitatorLeeds, UK
#4

I am going to redirect us back to the original poster, who has not had a chance to answer any of the questions put to them.

11

MarkCoventry, UK
#5

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

9

GillyWorcester, UK
#6

I found the exhaustion harder to manage than anything, because there is no version of a school morning that waits for you.

7me too 8

OrvalWinnipeg, CA
#7

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

11

OrphBath, UK
#8

Gently disagreeing with Orval, or rather adding the other half of it.

Something I got right was not changing anything about what my children eat. This is mine and it does not need to become theirs.

9

TasnimBradford, UK
#9

Picking up Orph’s point rather than starting a new one.

My partner took over the evening cooking for two months during the worst of it, and asking for that was harder than it should have been.

9

WrenFacilitatorLeeds, UK
#10

Adding a marker so it does not get lost: the most practical sentence in a thread like this is almost never the first one, and somebody arriving late will scroll straight past it.

16

HannahSheffield, UK
#11

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.

9me too 4