One of the challenges of having so many children is feeding them all. In our house this is not helped by most of them being fussy eaters. Despite my best efforts with home made purees in some cases and baby led weaning in others I might add! They didn't start out that way but as each child has grown and witnessed their older siblings faddiness they have joined in too. We have worked hard to make sure that each child will eat at least some fruit and veg but it has been a long road and very wearing at times. Things are getting better though, a roast dinner which used to be a nightmare with all their likes and dislikes is now one of the meals where they will all eat most of it. Elisha even asked me for gravy last week which she has always refused. There is hope for them all!
Kerrie will luckily eat almost anything and since the other children are at school most of the day their fussiness is off view so Lucy has a good chance of eating properly without witnessing their strange habits. Hopefully she will enjoy a wide variety of food too.
Yesterday Kerrie enjoyed the same lunch as I did. Pitta bread filled with chicken, tomato, lettuce and coleslaw followed by a banana.
Kerrie would live off bananas if we let her. I am convinced she is part monkey, she can scale any obstruction put in her path, she loves to climb. In fact she is climbing all the time at the moment, she is driving us all nuts so that banana mountain we buy each week could well come in handy!
I am waiting for Tesco to deliver the next van load of supplies. Considering our children are all so tiny I fail to understand how we can go through so much food! I am starting to think I should go directly to the warehouse and cut out the middleman.
The amount of milk we go through we should certainly buy a cow. During the recent panic buying of petrol it was embarrassing to go shopping to buy our usual weekend supplies of bread and milk, we looked like we were supplying the whole street. My self-conscious comments to the checkout operator about having five children to feed may have seemed a little more realistic and less like an excuse to stockpile had we have actually had them all with us.
We have learnt over the years though for the sake of our own sanity that it is best to do grocery shopping with as few children as possible so we try and go when most of them are safely ensconced in school.
I have said it before and I will say it again I love all my children dearly I don't love herding them all around the supermarket.
To be fair they are usually fairly well behaved but the combination of keeping an eye on three sets of small feet, keeping them all walking in the right direction, pushing a pram/entertaining the baby so she stays happy, fighting with an unwieldy trolley - why do I always get the one with a mind of it's own? keeping Kerrie sat down and amused for the duration in said mad trolley, trying to remember what I need despite the list which resembles an essay, in a building the size of an aircraft hanger with thousands of products on display, most of which I have never bought and suspect I will never actually ever need to, avoiding the strange behaviour of those people who frankly shouldn't be left in charge of themselves let alone a vehicle with four wheels! (Why do people feel the need to leave their trolley in the middle of the aisle while they wander away for their solitary tin of beans?) ......and breathe! Is all just a little too much for me. - try our instore cafe......are you kidding me? After that fun hour I need a vodka straight without the ice and a nice lie down, preferably away from all other forms of life human or otherwise!
This is why I love online shopping. I sit down and order when they are all asleep. I choose what we need and review at the end instead of slinging things in the trolley like a woman possessed in my haste to get the hell out of there and then on unpacking at home wonder how I am going to make meals out of the curious assortment of items I chose. I sit nice and calm with a cuppa and a list, a mealplan and sometimes I even sleep on it before paying so I can make sure I have got it right. Then a nice man brings it to my door at a timeslot I have chosen again based on the easiest time for me to get it all unpacked and put away i.e when they are all in school! Job done!
My other store of choice has to be Aldi. I love Aldi! It is simple, it is quick, it is cheap and everything is easy to find without having to hunt through a million and one other things to find a jar of jam. Genius! Better still it is usually so quick and easy I can leave Daddy in charge of the children in the car while I dash in and shop in peace. Bliss!
The truth is that we couldn't have bought any extra anyway because we wouldn't have had anywhere to store it. We are having to be very inventive as it is. Our kitchen is very small, so small in fact that our fridge freezer lives in the dining room, the cereal boxes live on top of this so they don't take up valuable cupboard space in the kitchen. This does have the added benefit of being handy at breakfast time. There is so little work surface in the kitchen that we often resort to lining up the plates on the ironing board when we are dishing up meals. Well we rarely use it anyway, the iron makes a useful doorstop too! Large family, small house and right on time here is Mr Tesco, I had better go and find somewhere to stash the goodies before several sets of eager eyes see them, hands off the half price Ben and Jerry's kids it is all mine!
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