What's For Tea?,

Some people are probably not aware of the fact that I have a lot of anxiety around food because I have a lot of anxiety about talking about my anxiety around food, so I just don't a lot of the time, but I've been trying to more in appropriate places and at appropriate times because I think it helps the scouts that I work with know that they can talk to me about their issues with food and know that I won't push them on things they're not comfortable on since I get it. Before you say, nobody would, trust me, I've been there and I've seen it handled badly.

Naturally, when it gets to a certain point in an evening, the conversation between most couples or families or sets of roommates if they eat together is to ask what's for tea or what do you fancy for tea, or what are we making for tea etc. We used to follow that question up with the word Mum because even when she wasn't making it, she was always the one deciding what we were having etc because she did the shopping and knew what was in the house. Yeah, we were kind of lazy. For Paul and I, it's a bit more complicated.

I've been a vegetarian for over two decades (yes, it really has been that long) and whilst I've taken part in Veganuary a couple of times I have never thought I could seriously go vegan for any long period of time, so much so that when our baby was having issues and it looked like either lacotse intolerance or CMPA (spoiler alert: it was CMPA) I had a good cry over the fact that I would have to stop breast feeding or pumping at all because I just knew that I couldn't drop all dairy from my diet to make sure that my breast milk was safe for Little Man. That might sounds selfish, but most of the protein in my diet is from things like eggs and cheese, and whilst I had at one stage got myself off drinking 'normal' milk in tea and coffee and started drinking Oatly, it's something I stopped a long time ago, and when I've tried to transition back to it, I just can't make myself do it. There is a taste difference and the longer it's been since I drank oat milk regularly, the more it tastes somewhat porridgy to me and it kind of ruins my drinks.

All that being said, Little Man is now of an age where he's starting to have bits of food and it's quite nice to be able to give him bits of things we're having, but that's not very possible given his allergy, so anything I'm making feels like I'm making three different versions of so we can all eat, or we're having to make two or three different dinners to get everyone fed and meet everyone's needs which is honestly making life much more complicated and I'm not even back at work yet! So here's hoping that it doesn't take little man too long to work his way through the milk ladder and outgrow his allergy to milk, butter, cheese, cream and all the other good things in life, particularly because most dairy free chocolate sucks.