Cooking During Pregnancy
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Homemaking on Thursday, July 31, 2008 4:00 PM
When I was pregnant with Camilla, I failed miserably at grocery shopping and cooking. At the time, I didn’t have a meal-planning system in place - I’d generally go to the grocery store, buy foods we liked, then try to put together meals from them as each night came. When my nausea and food aversion hit and I could barely stand the grocery store, let alone the idea of thinking of a meal to make every night, I simply stopped cooking. Poor Bryan only got home-cooked food during my first and second trimesters when my sister had mercy on him and invited us over for dinner.
I’m happy to report that this time around, I’m doing much better. I’m not up to my non-pregnant standards by any means, but I’m managing to make a grocery list every week, keep the house well-stocked with food, and cook several times a week. Compared with last time, it’s practically a miracle!
I attribute it partly to the fact that my nausea is milder with this second pregnancy, but mostly I’m giving credit to the system I developed during the first year of Camilla’s life. After I made it through the post-partum fog, I decided I simply had to reform my casual approach to shopping and cooking if I had a prayer of preparing dinner regularly with a baby in the house. So I started a strict schedule: I’d plan a whole week of meals at a time on Sunday evening, and make my grocery list then as well. Grocery shopping happened on Mondays, then we’d have all the food we needed for our dinners. Each night, I’d look at my list of meals for the week, decide which one I felt like making, and prepare it.
This system takes discipline, but it has saved me during this pregnancy. I don’t want to think about food, but I can have Bryan suggest meals, make the grocery list myself, send him shopping if I’m not up for it, then prepare the meals whether they sound appetizing to me or not. (They usually don’t.) Much of the time, I can even manage to eat once dinner’s made!
Do you have a system for meal-planning, shopping, and cooking, or are you a more casual type? How did/do you manage during pregnancy?
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