Foooooood

[ailbhe]

Here I am breastfeeding a newborn again.

FEED ME.

I am barely functional and hugely short-tempered, most days, and it's entirely due to inadequate food intake. I can't do anything needing two hands because if I put Astrid in a sling she spits up on me, but she also doesn't want to be laid flat on her back because that makes her spit up too. We need to buy a reclining bouncy chair device. I'm sure we used to have one but Rob can't find it in the attic and we may have given it away.

For brief periods (long enough to put something oven-ready in or out of the oven) her sisters can prop her up, so oven-ready things are fine. But even cutting a bagel in half can be a problem, unless she's asleep.

I really need to figure something out. We need oven-ready dinners for evenings, which are easy enough, but we also need something ready to eat lunchwise. We tried reversing it, but it takes Rob just as long to get a bunch of sandwiches ready in the evening (when I'm feeding the baby more or less constantly) as it does to get a basic cooked dinner. And that makes the evening meal too late.

Weekends spent cooking things up are the answer for the evening meal... but what about snacks and lunchtime?

I bet by the time I have this figured out she'll have stopped eating so much. Two days now, maybe three, she's eaten almost constantly from noon to 7pm, sometimes eating in her sleep. As I said earlier, if she doesn't weigh 13lb by Monday I'll send her back.

Comments

[juliet]

Crackers and something sandwich-filling-ish on the top? Or get Rob just to slice bread (or get pre-sliced, but you said something about bagels that suggested that pre-sliced-type bread might not work to be filling; it certainly doesn't for me, and the only person I'm generating calories for is myself) in the morning, which should only take a minute or so, then stick all the slices in a plastic bag and get one of the girls to put sandwich-filling-stuff on it at appropriate points. They could be open sandwiches if that's easier to eat (you certainly get more protein-ish filling per slice of bread in that case :) )?

Things I find satisfying/filling in sandwiches: hummous (pre-made tubs are easiest, obviously); refried beans (cook up at weekends?); carrot & lentil pate (ditto?); Tofutti fake-cream-cheese and Marmite (if you don't like Marmite, the stuff on its own is a bit boring but they do ones with chives etc in). I also use leftover pasta sauce or chilli or whatever as sandwich-filling sometimes. Other things if I weren't vegan: cheese, assorted meat pate type things, tuna.

Other pre-made beanish dips besides hummous? Can't remember now what sort of things they have in supermarkets; butter-bean dip is lovely but you'd have to make it yourself. Baba ganoush or similar aubergineish thing?

Soups also sound like a good potential idea. Or, if Rob's making an evening meal anyway, could he (depending on what it is) make extra & you could have it for lunch/snacks the next day? I find this works well with chilli/curry (if you don't like using next-day rice, rice microwaves fine IIRC so could be left dry in a microwavable pot ready to have water added & be stuck in the microwave); less well with pasta although next-day pasta *can* be OK if oil or sauce is applied when it's still hot.