The Not Hungry Games

I’ll just admit it here at the outset: I really struggle with mealtimes.

Maddy says I’m a clean freak. I don’t think this is fair – I’m definitely more particular than she is about certain things, and I definitely get a bit worked up about stuff like food stuck in the kitchen plughole, floors that obviously need hoovering, or dishes sat in the sink for days. But having a baby has really forced me to get over this  – or try to.

Nobody expects a baby to be clean and tidy. Even at my advanced age (33) there exist photos of a chortling baby Matt smeared in food. But that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with the mind-numbing repetitiveness of it all.

I’ve struggled with trying to relax and not panic-clean as Ted catapults spoonfuls of yoghurt around the room. I’ve found it difficult to avoid leaping from my seat and scrubbing at the carpet as a mouthful of half-masticated Weetabix plops onto it, immediately setting into a cement-like substance. A successful mealtime at the moment (11 months old) is not having to put Ted’s outfit in the laundry immediately after finishing (despite the bib/covers he’s wearing).

Then there’s the food itself. I really must defer to Maddy here because she’s bought all the baby cookbooks and weaning guides that exist, and has painstakingly sat down and made things that are baby-friendly so Ted can eat them. It’s painful enough when your kid immediately throws whatever you’re serving them on the floor, but it’s doubly painful when you spent half of the previous day’s precious child-free hours making said food.

We’ve had to remove salt from our diet for anything we plan to feed to Ted. I’ve made several Sunday roasts now where I’ve had to get creative with seasoning to avoid adding sodium chloride to potatoes as they boil, or chickens before they hit the oven. It’s not the end of the world and of course I want him to eat healthily and safely. But when he doesn’t even eat the chicken…

Another difficult thing is teaching them. The best way for babies to learn how to properly eat is to observe you doing it. Ideally, we’d all sit down as a family and share a meal, eating the same thing. This occasionally happens. The tough reality is that eating a meal while feeding a baby at the same time is an exercise in rush-eating. I’ve joylessly shovelled food (including last year’s Christmas dinner) into my mouth at double speed in order to free up my hands so I can either feed Ted or pick him up when he’s bored of being in his highchair (roughly about six minutes after entering it). Selfishly, the ideal mealtime for me is to eat my food either before or after Ted has eaten his, but this isn’t going to help him learn to keep his food on the table.

As with everything with babies, though, this will all change over a surprisingly short amount of time, and I’ll forget it ever bothered me. It’s no massive hardship to wash a few babygrows, and much as I’m bored of cleaning the plastic floor guard every time he’s finished eating, it’s hardly a taxing job.

And on the plus side, the moments when you give your baby a new food are magical: the extreme facial expressions of delight/disgust, the unexpected items that turn out to become favourites (baby courgettes, who knew) and when your kid eats a thing you made (in my case, home-baked bread) and asks for more – you forget what you were complaining about. Until it’s laundry time, anyway.