Some like it hot (but mothers get it cold)

In the beginning, there were hot meals. And they were good.

Recently? Not so much.

When Baby B first came home, we were able to time her feedings so that I'd feed her while The Husband was making dinner, thn put her down in the Pack and Play right afterward so she'd sleep while we were enjoying our meal together. "Look at us," we thought. "We have a baby AND we're still able to share a nice, hot meal together! We totally rock!"

How naive.

Fast-forward a couple of months and things are quite different now. Gone are the days when I can feed Baby B and move her somewhere else to sleep. She'll either sleep soundly nestled against me after a feeding, or if I move her elsewhere, she'll wake up and want to do something more active than sleep, and watching me eat isn't on that list for her.

I've recently become good at eating most meals in the recliner while nursing her, so we started timing dinner so that I start feeding her, then a few minutes later I get my own food and eat while she was eating. This works well with most foods we eat, though sandwiches are probably the biggest realistic challenge. (I say realistic challenge because I would imagine soup would be more difficult, but I wouldn't even try to eat that while nursing her.) The key seems to be getting The Husband to pre-cut my food so it's in more manageable amounts and ready for bites.

However, this past week was more of a challenge because *somebody* who's less than 22 inches tall would decide to not eat peacefully and I'd have to keep latching her on, which meant I needed use of my hands and had to put down my food until she was done. I wouldn't say this happened every time, but quite close. Hot meals? Yeah, they're not so hot when you have to put them down for a bit before eating them. I imagine that pretty soon, I'm going to be so used to eating cold (or, room temperature) meals that it's going to become my preference. I'll have to let my food cool off drastically before I can even touch it!

(On a semi-related note, we decided from the beginning when giving Baby B her once-a-day 2-oz. bottle of formula before bed to see if she'd take it at room temperature, as opposed to needed it warmed up. My thinking was that way, I could just put a bottle that has [pre-boiled] room temperature water in it in her diaper bag if we're going out, then mix formula in if we need to feed her [I'm not comfortable with the idea of nursing in public, and I'm not sure how realistic it is anyway since she spits up so much during and after feedings]. I know a lot of babies love the heated formula and don't want it if it's too cool to them, so I was trying to avoid her ever knowing that heated formula existed. And, so far she's taken to it without a problem at all. Of course, I can't control the temperature of my breastmilk when nursing her, but we try not to heat the milk too much when feeding her milk from a bottle, just to prevent her from rejecting the room temperature formula. Again, so far so good, it seems.)