disagreeing on this views welcome please

[1dilemma]

disagreeing so much I 'went for a walk' tonight!! leaving dh with the LO when it was chaos.
(came back after about 15 minutes to find them playing with the baked bean tins!)

when your lo get in from nursery do you feed them if so what?

we have one at school who has packed lunches, loves food, school will re-heat hot food.

we have another at nursery who is getting breakfast at home (wheetabix or banana) breakfast at nursery piece of toast drink, cooked lunch at nursery, tea at nursery varies between cooked or cheese/crackers/fruit etc.

then when we get home (about 6 ish at the moment) dh insists on cooking meal eg spag bol and feeding everyone.

school child eats it all, nursery one picks a bit but is irritable because sooo tired, evening then becomes bath and bed.

I would prefer sending reheatable lunch to school then a nursery tea type arrangement, varying from yog and fruit to spag bol according to need/hunger.
dh says he can't cope without food.
I want to spend time wiht the dcs not have our life revolve around food, I also like eating just soup or grown up meals from time to time.

So what would you do?
How do you plan your evening when you get back.

Bed time for both is 8.30 too late by far IMHO

TIA

This is all about having different needs IMO. The children always eat when they come home - around 5pm. This is too early for us - we're not home at that time in any event, so we eat later. It's pointless trying to force a family evening meal when they are little - it doesn't suit anyone - too late for the children, too early for the adults ... Your DH has needs too though.

Modern life means that the ideal of all sitting around the table to eat as a family every night is not easily attainable.

Tired from school and nursery, children need to be able to relax, have their tea and be into bed at a reasonable hour.

Then you and your DH can eat together, as a couple after the children are in bed.

Or rather than starting a meal from scratch why not batch-cook on the weekends - bolognaise/casserole/cottage pie/lasagne, whip out from the freezer, into micro and on the table in ten minutes flat.

My children have school lunch, I cook on weekends only as I generally don't finish work until 5 pm, and DP not home til 6 pm.

The boys have fruit/sandwich/yoghurt for their tea.

We have freezer food as I've detailed above, plus soup, salad, whatever is quick and easy

Yeah always tricky. Here is an idea. This is what my MIL does when she has our kids to stay.

#She bathes them and puts themin Jammies then gives them tea at about 6pm. Whereas I usually give them tea at 5ish then bath and jammies after. So you could bath and jammy them up while DH cooks.....

I have tried her way a few times and do like it. We now do this alot on Fridays as it makes the evening so chilled out as after dinner they can pretty much go straight to bed.

If the younger one has had a nursery tea then they can just sit in on the meal or go to bed just before.

What do you think?

Having said that I only eat with the kids if DH is away or out for dinner. Otherwise I do eat later at 8 or 9 with him (or should I say I eat again later

I'm a SAHM now but t'was not ever thus. When lo's were at Nursery and had nursery high tea at 4.30pm I never ever arsed around feeding them a meal later. They simply wouldn't have been interested and there were better things to do.

This is what I would do. Serve cooked meals in the evening for those 3 who need them and just accept that the lo may be better off with a light snack.

If your dh cannot have a cooked meal at lunchtime he will end up feeling somewhat underfed on sandwiches in the evening. It is also likely that your school child will benefit from more cooked meals.

But I would make sure that some of the pressure was taken off, by cooking for the freezer at the weekend and making sure that some of that was done by dh. So that a cooked meal in the week is just a matter of a few minutes reheating- needn't take longer than fixing a short snack.

We did this and still had time for bedtime. Though we did rearrange the bathtime routine, so that was not a necessary part of bedtime.

When dd was at nursery I would offer a light meal or snack when she got home, about 6, and cook something heavier for dh and I. Now I send lunch and dinner to her CM (she has dinner there at 5.30). Sometimes she still sits with us and has a little snack at dinner time, but never a meal.

Neither dh nor I like to wait until after bedtime (8-8.30) to eat so on CM days we try to have something very quick like soup and bread, pasta and salad, or leftovers from the freezer (I try to cook double amounts at the weekend).

Could DH cook up batches of stuff so it doesn't take ages? Even if each time he cooks he bungs half in the freezer it would cut the problem by 50%...

Could you, perhaps, cook a day ahead of yourselves so you can reheat the meal for all of you. You/DH could then prepare/cook the meal for the following day when the children were in bed, or bulk cook one evening/weekend and freeze stuff. This would work for your soup, spag bol, chilli, cottage pie etc type meals.

Sometimes you could do something easy like an omlette or fishfingers for the kids and have a 'grown up' meal when they've gone to bed.

HTH

Thanks all
we do batch cook as much as poss sometimes it doesn't work, lo would eat spaghetti till the cows come home so we default to that too much IMHO

will ponder and see how we can improve things

I beleive lemons are very good!

cook different stuff for yourself and dh

let dh do the kid cooking and you get on with chicken wrapped in parma ham and other wanky stuff

err custy I said soup too...

But I do like your idea!