Clean, ordered, quiet ... if only it really were like this. Photograph: Getty Images
A few months ago I wrote this post, containing dietary recommendations for the busy parent.
But spare time is a volatile currency in the world of childcare. It is subject to a kind of retrospective inflation. Just when you thought you had none, something changes in your routine - your child stops sleeping during the day, for example - and you realise you have even less, meaning that you had previously been rich without knowing it. You fool! If only you'd realised how time-strapped you were going to be, you would have savoured all those precious minutes squandered on selfish fripperies such as washing and sitting down.
So I thought it was time to update the menu. Here are some meals I have learned to enjoy in an era of leisure time austerity.
Briquettes of cold plain rice
It is impossible to cook exactly the right amount of rice for a toddler. You always end up with a sieve half full of the stuff, clotted into soggy chunks.
Grab briquette of cold plain rice out of sieve with hands and eat. (Alternative serving suggestion: make cup of tea, and then, having ditched tea bag in sink, spot old rice abandoned on adjacent kitchen surface. Use tea spoon to eat rice.)
Broccoli stalks
In order to sneak nutrients into my child's diet I have taken to trimming the ends from steamed broccoli, creating tasteless flecks of dark green goodness which can be smuggled into pretty much anything. This technique has the added benefit that delicately trimming broccoli with a pair of kitchen scissors is strangely therapeutic. The downside is that you are left with bald, gnarled stumps of vegetable.
Take gnarled stumps from chopping board. Eat them.
Neat icing
There is only so long you can perpetuate the myth that fruit is the highest denomination of treat in existence. Eventually, your child will be exposed to cake. It usually happens at a birthday party, where withholding the goodies from your own toddler would be (a) an implicit and obnoxiously pious rebuke to your host for serving sweets, and (b) really mean.
So you surrender. But you feel guilty about all those empty calories, especially in the thick layer of icing. So with your finger you discreetly squeegee the top of a piece of cake before feeding it to your child.
Take finger covered in sugary icing. Lick clean.
Fragments of rice cake served in a pouch of baby buggy
Most push-chairs have pockets at the back which can be used to store snacks (and to hide house keys from yourself). After time these pouches will collect hundreds of bits of broken rice cracker.
Scoop out fragments of cracker from pouch. Stuff in mouth.
Bum-flattened raisins a la car seat
On taking your child out of the car, you notice that she has dropped some raisins during the journey. They have been pressed into the upholstery of her seat.
Peel flattened raisins from car seat. Eat.
Does anyone else have a sleep-deprived, famished hankering for such delicacies? Or, for that matter, any cunning tips for smuggling nutrients into a toddler's meal?
