Explaining an injection to a five-year-old

Something practical: I do the cooking earlier and eat later. It costs me nothing and it removed the daily friction entirely.

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.

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

Coming back to say the household adjusted, that nobody noticed as much as I feared, and that dinner is once again just dinner.

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.

This is the honest version, and the honest version is harder to write.

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.

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

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

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

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.

What I did not anticipate was how much of parenting is snacking alongside somebody, and how strange that felt when I did not want to.