Somehow, someway, we have got a one-year-old in the house—a thirteen-month-old if you want to be specific. The truth is that I meant to write this blog post about one month ago (almost two), but June passed me by, and then so did half of July, and in terms of this last year that is just how it goes. The last time I wrote a blog post it was about the weirdness of eating while pregnant, and in honor of E’s first birthday I wanted to look back today at 400 days of parenting (at the time of this writing), through the meals that have sustained me and the way my relationship with food and cooking has morphed and changed along with, well, everything else.
At the end of my pregnancy, I wrote a post about the lessons I was bringing with me into parenting from eating during that time; to not be so hard on myself, to know this too shall pass. Early parenthood was also a time of relinquishing expectations and adapting to unanticipated circumstances, especially after baby E (born on the cusp of full-term) struggled with eating and weight loss in the first weeks of his life. After nine months of nausea, I was treated to one last bout when I reacted badly to the anesthesia after his birth and to my disappointment, could not keep down the turkey sandwich that I had been so anticipating. The first food I stomached after E’s birth was cottage cheese. I was thankful for the double smash burger I'd had the night before my scheduled C-section.
When I think of the meals that sustained us as a family in the chaos of E’s first month I think of dependence on the nourishment of others in a difficult time. I remember the endless Publix runs my mom made to buy us easy and healthy snacks (little guacamole packs, cherries, almond butter pouches eaten in the pantry in the middle of the night). I think of the takeout Mexican a cousin treated us to when she learned E had to go back to the hospital; eating cold quesadillas and churros on a horribly uncomfortable plastic couch. I remember the endless procession of meal train delights; salmon and quiches and a baked ziti we ate while we watched Succession on our fourth wedding anniversary. Those meals came with an endless procession of friends and family, nourishment all the same.
And this too did pass, as E finally began to gain weight and we began to gain our footing. That summer I ate many, many turkey sandwiches. I baked again; strawberry buttermilk cake during naptime. We found new rhythms, new grooves, and every Friday night gathered with friends who had been parents only a few weeks longer than we had and ordered two large pizzas from Dominos (one thin crust with pepperoni and banana peppers and one hand-tossed with sausage and green peppers) and ate them with ranch and drank wine while the babies snoozed. We took E out to eat for the first time (burgers at Marty’s GM), went to cookouts and watched The Bachelorette with even more babies and tired parents, thanking the universe for our little community. By the end of the summer I managed to cook dinner a few times while E watched in his little bouncer, finally at peace with being put down. On those nights I felt the most accomplished I ever have.
Friday night pizza, E's first dinner out, ft. Aunt Katya, strawberry buttermilk cake, homegrown garlic in the mail, maternity leave snacks with maternity leave friends.
Summer ended along with my maternity leave, and September passed by in a blur of takeout and easy lunches. This is a hard part of parenting, when you go back to work and the meal train stops and the visits slow down and you are just IN IT. The Dominos continued.
But when I think of the fall what I really think of are the transition into a series of firsts; Rosh Hashanah (brisket) and Halloween (passing out candy with baby skeleton E), Thanksgiving (he slept in my arms through dinner), and then into December with E’s first bite of solids (broccoli two ways courtesy of Solid Starts). I look back at the foods he first loved; gnawing on mango pits, yogurt and beans, whole leaves of off-season basil. We delighted in every new food to try, diligently crossing potential allergens off a printed meal plan. We wrung our hands at choking hazards, and slowly got more comfortable, giving him small bites off our plates, tastes of new foods when we went out to eat (cultivating a love of El Cazador refried beans that continues to this day). Before we knew it he was gnawing on crusts of bread and crushing falafel and trying HIS first Domino’s pizza (surprisingly not an initial fan favorite). I look back at the turn into the new year and I see us coming back to ourselves in the kitchen; Bo Ssam for Christmas, black-eyed peas for the New Year. E’s bedtime became more regular and we were eating dinner again, just the two of us, after he went to sleep.
Dinner Solid Starts style, E chowing down at Brighton Beach for the first time.
And so it goes, that time has accelerated with each passing month as our lives begin to resemble again some version of what they did before we were parents. Of course, there is not a return, but a convergence of some sorts between who we were and who we have become as a family. Some concept of balance and normalcy returning as we resume keeping up with work and seeing friends and reading books and cooking for fun, with E trying food alongside until recently when, hello toddlerhood, he seems to have been reduced to muffins and PB&Js. Recent dishes from Stu's kitchen have included steak panzanella salad, a Tunisian fish platter, baguette sandwiches, puttanesca. At the same time, we have adjusted to the compression of time with more one-pot meals (Melissa Clark’s Dinner in One is our bible), frozen delights (thank you Trader Joe’s fried fish filets), and the continued breath of air that is Friday night takeout.
Parenting is a wild ride. And now we have a one-year-old, for whom I spent an entire day baking a lemon-blueberry cake, even though he didn’t know it was his birthday, which I then cut into mini cakes and iced (and colored with dehydrated blueberries that I drove 40 minutes out of my way to buy) and stacked into layers, rushing during naps, going to the store to buy cupcakes for the rest of our guests, just so he could destroy it in under 10 minutes in front of our whole village. And he loved it, so I would do it again in a heartbeat. And that is really how it goes.
In lieu of a recipe I am including a few parenting books that have acted as refuge in the chaos of this first year. There’s no real recipe to being a parent, but these books have all given helpful advice or a sense that others have been here before. Happy reading!
Favorite Parenting Books (2023-2024)
Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story by Leslie Jamison *yes, this is a book about divorce, but it also has some extremely relatable and beautiful nuggets on the first year of parenting.
Fair Play: A Game Changing Solution For When You Have To Do Much To Do by Eve Rodsky ** not parenting specifically, but a game changer for busy parents in my book (especially two working parents!)
Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Marc Weissbluth *** the only sleep resource I could find that didn’t overcomplicate it – ACTUALLY helpful.
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