cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3796123
What do your weekly meals look like for you and your fam? I generally enjoy cooking, what I don’t enjoy is the negotiations that come with cooking, and with kids, it’s even worse. I’m also the kind of person that could eat the same 5 dishes for a year without much fuss or question. That’s the ADHD lodged in my brain for you.
The negotiation, or even the anticipation of negotiations, makes me agitated. If I could, I’d be a food dictator, but that’s not how living with people works. It’s annoying enough to me that I often push it to the back of my mind and just “figure it out” on the fly. That’s not conducive to making good choices, though, only convenient choices.
If I’m going to do most of the cooking, I’ll want a schedule of meals, so I can both plan, anticipate, and head-off any objections. I struggle with being assertive on this point, and I’m told often, “We don’t need to do that much planning.” Which, as someone with ADHD into my late 30s, I know is not true, and I do need that much planning if not more. Structure is something I need, and the kids at this age obviously thrive off structure as well.
So anyway, how do you tackle this? I need to get this sorted out for myself, but also for my kiddos. Kiddo 1 just had an annual checkup and is low on iron, and is growing increasingly picky about food. Kiddo 2 is still in that “I’ll try anything in front of me.” phase, and getting this sorted out now hopefully means I can avoid the pickiness down the line.
I’m going to cross post this in [email protected] & [email protected] as I think it has some clear overlap.
It sounds like your biggest challenge might be bringing your partner onboard. I can’t help with that.
What I can say has worked in my house is coming up with a list of our usual meals and just picking off of it for the week. You get to make a choice, so feel less trapped by schedule (I can’t stand a food schedule that repeats weekly). At the same time those choices are from a limited list with no wrong choices, so the choice is less overwhelming. The only things that make the list are things everyone says yes to, not meaning ‘I love it’ but ‘I will eat it and it meets my nutrional needs.’
You can even pop the meals into a meal planner thing (I use a spreadsheet) that will dump out a shopping list. There is probably an app that does it well that won’t take upfront work. That reduces the mental energy of “putting together a shopping list” that sometimes is just the last straw that would stop me.
Yeah, part of the issue comes from the way we both process information. She has a vast internal catalog of things we eat all the time, I need to externalize that information to properly retain it and be aware of it. So part of the process is finding the right tool that we’ll both use for storing that information externally. I think I found one (Recipya), and we’re already collaborating on our collective list of recipes.
I get where my partner is at, which is, she already handles a lot, so this is one more thing that could be seen as being put on her plate. The way I organize and process information (externally) ultimately results in various external storage solutions (from notebooks to calendars to apps to whiteboards), which can also be seen as one more thing to do, remember, engage with etc. When you can do all that management mostly in your head, I know it can look excessive and be exhausting. That issue is outside the scope, and is an eternal struggle, since my brain isn’t going to suddenly become neurotypical.