The school run in week four

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.

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

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

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

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

Here, reading, and glad you posted.

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

The school run and the evening are where my energy dips, and reorganising the week around that was more effective than anything else I tried.

I cook one meal and eat a smaller portion of it, and I stopped making myself something separate at about month three because it was unsustainable.

What I have been careful about is not making my eating a topic at the table. My children do not need a running commentary on any of this.

The evening meal was the hard one. Everybody else hungry at six and me not hungry until nine, and it took a year to find a workable shape.

Sitting with you on this one.

I batch cook on a Sunday and it has been the single most useful habit. On the days I have nothing, there is something.