Feeling like a crap mother...food and bedtime advice please

[Mummytron]

I have a nine year and a five year old, they are wonderful and don't cause me any trouble. They are bright, polite and I count my blessings every day.

However I have problems with meals and bedtimes. This is probably the rod I made for my own back but now I need advice on how to turn it around.
They are quite fussy but I find myself generally making them the same rota of food every night.
Meals are: either fish fingers, sausages, turkey dinosaurs or pizza with either pasta or potato with either carrots or beans.
They have ham sandwiches/wraps/ cucumber/ crisps/ petit fill us for lunch
And breakfast is coco pops or frosties.

I'm worried they are eating well and I struggle to get them to try new stuff.
Any tips?

Then bedtime...
I like this time of night and always wanted it be a special time with them.
I read a story and they have a small drink and two biscuits but it's such a fuss. I know children put off things like this but I just wanted to know what others do?

Thanks all
Xx

My dc are similar age and their diet sounds identical although mine have hot school dinners for lunch. They eat loads of different things in school they'd never try for me. If they're eating something and are happy healthy and get plenty exercise then try not to worry too much.

Thanks fed x

I definitely struggle with doing dinners! I try and do something different for a change, then my son doesn't eat it, so I go back to the same routine. I'm getting bored of it now, so in the next couple weeks I'm going to try and make a meal plan for the week.
It's always pasta, pizza with garlic bread or chips, or chips, chicken/sausages and beans or veg. Luckily my son, like me, is a big pasta eater. There's a lot you can go with pasta, so a pasta bake about twice a week would be good. Making a cottage pie wouldn't take too long either. I know I buy things in anticipation of making something with them but they end up staying there unused and it's annoying.

At the end of the day I'm too tired to stand there arguing with my son about what he wants for dinner, so it'll be easier to just look and see what I need to do rather than trying to quickly throw something together. My son is fussy too so I'm just going to put something he likes with something different. If he doesn't eat it, he doesn't eat it.

Bedtime routines are always a fuss. For me it's battle to brush teeth, painstakingly long time to read a book, or 5, we sit sometimes and chat about what he's going to do at nursery, then the wait for him to fall asleep before I can go back upstairs for a bath (or he'll want to get in). He doesn't really come out of his room, but if he does it's straight back in. I hate the time of day between 5pm-8pm. I'm not a good eater and then after dinner, I'm thinking if it's going to be an easy bedtime ie. no battles! It's the small stress of everyday I have to troop through, ha!

I went through a phase of fussy eating with dd2. She would only eat pasta, pizza or bread. She would remove the topping or sauce if it contained so much as a vegetable. She had been quite a good eater anf over a period of a few months got fussier and fussier so it kind of crept up on me.

Like Theregoes suggested I did a meal plan and got organised. I made sure that every meal contained something she liked eg a big mountain of uncooked carrots and cucumbers (even with a roast or mild curry) and there was always yogurt or bananas for pudding (her favourites) so she never went starving. At the start she wasn't eating anything much but within about two months she was trying most things and I started to do more pasta and pizza again. In the last week she's had fish pie, chicken fajitas (with no spices), a beef casserole, sausages and mash - all things she wasn't eating two years ago.

i really think it's true when people say most kids won't starve themselves. Dd sometimes goes for a few days without eating much and yet never moans about being hungry. i can see she's healthy so it's not really an issue anymore.

Bedtime routine . Follow all the advice about routines and yet I still have two monsters refusing to go to bed/ brush teeth/ have baths. Every night is a battle which I am currently avoiding by mumsnetting!