What I do differently now about praising food

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

To the opening post rather than to the thread: Nemone, this is my version of it.

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

You have said something a lot of us have not managed to. Thank you.

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.

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.

Agreed, and I have nothing to add to it.

Somebody in this circle said that children notice how you talk about food more than what you eat, and I have thought about that constantly since.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reading and nodding. Nothing to add, and I wanted you to know somebody had read it.

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.

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

My eldest asked me directly what I was doing and I gave a short, honest, boring answer, and it has never come up again.

What I found hardest was the smell of cooking during the first two months. I was making food I could not be in the room with.