Feeding Time: I’ll be under the table if you need me.

One kid is a challenge, so the logic is that two children will be doubly as tough;

(👶🏻 + 👱🏻‍♀️ = 👶🏻👱🏻‍♀️)👍🏻

It’s only when you’re sat in the middle of two girls screaming at you for entirely different reasons do you realise that this theory is a crock of shit, and the difficulty level has increased exponentially;

(👶🏻+👱🏻‍♀️=👶🏻👶🏻👶🏻👶🏻👶🏻👸🏼👸🏼👸🏼👸🏼👸🏼🦄🔥💥🌪😭👺🤢) x 7

One of the more obvious examples of this child multiplication phenomenon is the evening meal, which seems to have gone from intricate foods and ambiant background music to how I’d imagine a prison riot looks, in just under 3 months. One child was a doddle, because we outnumbered her 2:1, so the adults still had the power, but feeding time these days feels more like spinning plates on sticks. Hundreds and hundreds of plates that descend quickly into an unreasonable ball of tears and snot if you let one of the them fall slightly off’ their perch. 

“I don’t like it”

“You’ve not tried it”

*Dahlia cries, either Aims or I get up to rock her*

“Faith, please don’t (she’s spooning food onto the floor”

“I want milk”

“Try some dinner then you can have milk”

*Faith runs off screaming*

*Dahlia cries, either Aims or I get up to rock her*

*Faith returns to the kitchen and is now dancing* 

If you’re the proud owner of little people, this will probably sound familiar. 

I love food. I love eating it and I love making it. People that follow my Instagram account will already know that I fancy myself as a bit of a chef, having already declared myself as the probable winner of Masterchef in 2019 (I’d given myself a bit of time to practise desserts). However, this was before the arrival of child No.2, who would be known as ‘The Killer of Routines’ if she were a royal character in Game of Thrones. Little baby Dahlia isn’t the sole cause of our daily table based chaos, but the timing of her arrival coincides with when it all turned to shit.

As I mentioned in my previous blog, Dahlia is a good baby, who generally only wants to be fed, changed and left alone. The exception to this placid behaviour is mealtime, when she decides to scream the house down for no obvious reason – she literally does it from the second you pick a fork up, right until the second you put it back down. My guess is she’s jealous, as the food before us smells a lot better than the ‘old shoe’ scented formula we pour down her neck by the bucket load. Meanwhile this is all to the soundtrack of whichever awful Nickelodeon show we’ve put on a loop on the TV to bribe Faith to at least come and sit with us.

Faith “eats” with us, which means we eat the same thing for convenience. So anything containing spices, alcohol or taste are completely off’ the menu. All for her to go on a hunger strike, surviving only on a diet of full fat milk and 6 cheerios a week, which is a real concern as one of the main functions of a parent is to provide the child with nourishment. She also occasionally licks the jam off of her toast if she hasn’t already filled up on 3 pints of cow juice (don’t worry, the health visitor tell us that this is perfectly normal and she’ll grow out of it).

This blog is called the ‘Tiny Terorrist Survial Guide’, so that sugguests I can offer some kind of guidance on matters such as this- and I can’t. But here are some top tips that might help someone, somehow;

Baked Beans.

You can forget braised fennel and seasame seed pak choi as sides for a few years. Add baked beans to every meal instead. Every. Meal.

Distractions.

Netflix and the BBC iPlayer are both filled with plenty of shite to rot a young mind. Stick it on an iPad/phone at the table to give your child a reason to be there.

Have one or less children.

If you enjoy listening to your own thoughts as you savour your food, maybe don’t have kids?

Use jealousy to make your toddler eat.

She won’t want to eat the broccoli, but suggest that Snuggy (her favourite teddy) is going to scoff it and she’ll put it in her mouth just show him who’s boss. 

Like I said, I can’t help. But here’s a stock image I pulled off of the internet to show how it might be one day. False hope is better than no hope, right?

Den.