There is a reason why they call 5pm the witching hour. If I could serve dinner at 3:30 everyday, directly after our kids wake up from naps, and guarantee that they would stay full until morning, I assure you I would.
But alas, dinnertime falls between 5:30-6:00 in our home, and this time of day has looked vastly different for us over the last 4 years of raising babies.
We have shifted this time to meet the needs of our kids, nursing babies, ourselves (because Mama needs to stay sane), and our marriage (because sometimes you just need a date night in with an adult meal (read: Tai takeout) and adult conversation after the kiddos are sound asleep).
The Dinnertime Seasons:
Our kids are currently 4, almost 3, and 16 months. About a year ago, I have blurred memories of serving Ryan and Natalie dinner at their little table while nursing Emily on the floor next to them so that I could also help 16-month-old Natalie feed herself with a spoon. Matt gets home early every night, but our kids were hard pressed to make it to 5:00 before eating during this season, so I typically handled dinner on my own before he got home. This dinnertime season was called survival.
Then we shifted to Emily feeding herself solids in her bumbo in the middle of the kitchen table while Ryan and Natalie ate at their little table and I walked between the 3 of them, helping with bites, water refills, food spills, and answering all of the food-related requests like cutting, warming, replenishing, and hand/utensil cleaning. We’ll call this dinnertime season busy.
A few months passed and Emily outgrew her bumbo and moved into an actual high chair that could be pulled up to Ryan and Natalie’s little table. In this season, I served the appetizer first for everyone. And the appetizer was always fruits and veggies. Edamame was a big hit, and so were frozen peas, frozen grapes, raspberries and roasted broccoli with balsamic. After they ate their appetizers, they got the main course: pasta, chicken nuggets, pizza, breakfast for dinner, grilled cheese with ham roll-ups, and chicken divan were a few of the favorites. And although dinnertime for the kids was done early before Matt got home, this season felt pretty smooth. So we’ll call this season now we’re getting somewhere.
During that season, every few weeks, Matt and I would attempt a family dinner where we all sat down together to eat the same meal and talk about our days right when he got home. Each time, we ended those meals with a shared look of “yeah, we’re not there yet.”
But then, one night, we tried again, kind of tip-toeing into a process that had pretty much failed time and time again, and guess what happened? We all sat. We all ate. And we actually talked about our days and we even laughed. And when the meal was over, our kids played in the living room while we cleaned up (as in, they played without us even though they could see us, just in case you were missing the significance of this moment). And when it was time to go up for bath, the kitchen was clean and everyone was full, and I didn’t feel ready to fall asleep directly after our kids were down for the night. After that first successful family dinner and cleanup, I’m pretty sure Matt’s words were, “Well that couldn’t have gone any better.” For. real.
So now that our kids have matured light years from those early dinnertime survival days, we’ve started talking to them about the importance of trying new foods and filling their bellies with foods that will make them healthy and strong. It sounds like this: “Unfortunately, we can’t eat pasta every night (even though your mom would gladly lead that charge if she could), because then we wouldn’t be giving our bodies everything they need to grow. And plus we’d be missing out on so many new foods that we’ll one day love if we don’t love now.”
We sing a lot of Daniel Tiger’s “Try a new food and it might taste good” song.
We set the example by eating the veggies and protein on our own plates first before moving to the starch.
We talk about trying everything and not announcing if you don’t like something but just leaving it on your plate and moving on to the next thing.
We pull out condiments like ketchup, honey, balsamic glaze, butter, salt, and leftover Chick-Fil-A sauce to make new meats and veggies taste better.
And if they still don’t like what is on their plates, they talk with us instead of eat. And then, when Matt and I have finished our meal, we offer up any fruits and veggies they want from the fridge to fill them up: banana and peanut butter, celery and peanut butter, apples, carrots and ranch, raspberries, frozen peas, frozen grapes, strawberries, oranges, and edamame (not a veggies, but still green and still a good source of protein and iron, so we count it).
We figure this way, we meet our goal of sitting down together for a family meal and we encourage our kids to choose healthy snacks to fill their bellies when the meal they tried was not something they liked.
I would like to think that the more we sit down together and continue to introduce new foods in a positive way and set the example by eating the healthiest parts of our plates first, the more inclined our kids will be to follow suite.
So please be encouraged if you are in the survival season, or the busy season, or the now we’re getting somewhere but we’re not quite there season. We have by no means arrived, but I fear a little less now about our kids ordering buttered pasta with a side of peanut butter crackers on their first date, or not being able to make conversation in a group dinner setting because they’re overly concerned about no liking something on their plates.
If you’ve found any tricks that have worked to encourage trying new foods in your own home, I would love to hear them! Either leave a comment below or hop over to our Instagram page and comment on this photo of our family.
Don’t lose hope, friends. I have a feeling when our kids are grown and navigating big-kid struggles, we are going to yearn for the days when all we wanted was for them to eat their darn broccoli. 😉
I’ll leave you with the video. Oh, and I guess we can call this current stage we’re in: Wearing Spiderman costumes at the dinner table is completely normal.
