06 October 2022
Navigating dinnertime around kids and a busy farm life
WRITER: AS TOLD TO ANNA KING SHAHAB
PHOTOGRAPHERS: CLAIRE MOSSONG (LAURA GAVIN); ABBE HOARE (SARAH OLIVER + HOLLY SWANSSON)
When you’re navigating busy times on the farm along with kids and their differing tastes and temperaments, dinnertime can feel more like a hurdle to overcome before bedtime than a time to connect and share gratitude lists. Laura Gavin, Sarah Oliver and Holly Swansson, who all farm with their families in Te Ika-a-Māui, the North Island, share the ins and outs of their dinnertime routines with Anna King Shahab.
Laura Gavin, 30, lives with her husband Matt on a 380-hectare sheep and beef farm in Muriwai, twenty minutes' drive from Tūranga-nui-a-Kiwa Gisborne. She is mother to five-year-old James, three-year-old Ruby, and Hamish, who's about to turn two.
Matt grew up rural, thirty minutes from Wairoa. His is a big family, and they ate dinner together. My family was a bit different - three of us kids and I'm younger by five years, so for my mum and dad it was almost like having an only child. I was born in the South Island but grew up in Gisborne. On Mum's side we're Ngāpuhi; my grandma was born in Kāeo in Northland but moved south. I grew up not knowing much about my Māori ancestry, and I haven't been overly proactive about learning about my heritage until recently - in my job there's a cultural competency aspect, and that's prompted me to learn more, so I'm kind of just doing my own research.
We're sheep and beef farming on 380 hectares. It's just Matt on the farm, we don't have any staff apart from contractors who come in. I get out on the farm a bit and help out where I can in the yards - docking, draughting or crutching - but I also have a job working from home for Growing Future Farmers, which is a two-year apprenticeship-into-farming programme. I'm out on the farm with work once a week or so.
When James was a baby we got a routine going to get a better sleep. He was sleeping heaps during the day, which was handy as it meant I could get lots done - but it meant he wasn't sleeping well at night. The first day we tried with a routine he slept all night, so we stuck with it. To work to the routine I start making dinner around 4pm, depending on what I'm cooking, and we all eat together between five and five-thirty. After that it's a quick bath then a book, and the kids are in bed no later than 6.30pm.
I definitely don't want to be cooking two evening meals every day. We have lots of home-kill in the freezer, plus Matt shoots deer now and then, and I buy chicken. Meat and three veg is what we have - we're not overly adventurous, although sometimes I'll add curry or Mexican spices. I don't really meal-plan - I have done that in the past and it works well and you save so much money but I just don't have the time at the moment.
I'm a shocker, really - most days I get to 2pm and I'm like, "I didn't get anything out of the freezer!" So dinner is basically what I can cook from frozen or what I can defrost really quickly! I'm a bit slack like that at times. If I've got nothing on in the morning I'll put something on to slow cook.
The kids are all really good at eating everything. They love a chop - we call the marrow in the chop 'gold', and we can bribe them to eat up to get the gold. They'll give a curry a go, even if it's a bit spicy. We've got a good garden so we don't buy too many veggies. The kids love getting into the garden picking things to prepare for dinner. They're right into helping in the kitchen - James and Ruby anyway, Hamish is a bit little.
At dinnertime we just focus on the food. We don't really do those beautiful ideas like all sharing something good that happened in your day - it's more like, "Hurry up and eat, guys," because we just want to move on to the rest of the evening's chores. The talking and catching up happens when James gets home from school and when we're doing our outside jobs after school - feeding the lamb, the dogs, getting our house cow out of the paddock. We just cruise around chatting while we do those things.
Since James started school last term, Ruby has stepped up and loves to help. She's my shadow during the day, but as soon as James gets home she's happy to step back and let him be the big brother again. The kids set the table - they're really good at that and they fight over who's getting which plate, bowl and utensil, as they have their favourites to eat with. We have Matt's grandparents' bowls and the kids don't want the ones that are chipped; they're a bit competitive like that. Other than that, there's not a lot of ritual around our dinnertime, it's more, 'get in and get out.'
We try to make the kids eat all their dinner. We say, "You have to eat all your dinner if you want your milk afterwards," because they love their milk. But if we get to the point where they don't want to finish then that's fine, they can get down from the table. After dinner they say, "Thank you for dinner, can I please hop down?" and they put their plates in the kitchen. When I make dessert, everyone's allowed it - it doesn't matter how much dinner they've eaten. Dessert is just when I'm organised enough to do it, or when we have friends over.
Sometimes on a Sunday we go to Matt's parents' place for 'Sunday Funday'; the whole Gavin family is there and it's a big shared dinner. On a Friday often we'll catch up with friends up the valley at their place or here - on those days it's casual and not so much a proper sit-down dinner. Sometimes we do a roast so that there's leftover meat for sandwiches in the week. We have a wood-fired Aga oven but it's hard to control the temperature, so we only really use it for casserole-style meals.
We eat pretty much every meal at the kitchen table. Now and then in front of the TV but hardly ever. Our dinner table is the table Matt grew up using so it's a bit special - we often talk about this being the table Dad and his brothers and sisters sat at. In summer we might eat at the outdoor table on the deck, or go up the back and have a campfire dinner.
If I asked the kids what they want for dinner, every time they'd say pasta! They always want pasta. They like sausages too, which our butcher makes for us with the home-kill. We have a mincer and we've made our own mince, sausages, and salami. We're getting pretty strong on the homesteading thing - veggie garden, worm farm, compost pile, orchard, we have our house cow and I make cheese from her milk, plus we've got a pig for the freezer. The kids definitely know where their meat comes from - they come and butcher with us; they've seen animals get euthanised; and they're right into going hunting. We always say, "Thank you, cow, for your milk; piggy, for your meat; chook, for your eggs." The kids ask for Sandy the cow's milk as opposed to the other milk in the fridge.
I think our routine works well because the kids are close together in age, though I wonder if this summer might be different with James getting a bit older. We might end up pushing it out about thirty minutes, but otherwise I'm going to try and stick with the routine we've got.
Sarah Oliver, 32, and her partner Russell Tocker live on a dairy farm in the Manawatu, five minutes out of Te Papa-i-Oea Palmerston North, with their three children: six-year-old James, four-year-old Violet, and Ron, who's eighteen months.
We milk 700 cows on 350 hectares. It's a family farm - Russell's brother and dad work on the farm, too. Russell gets up at 4am every morning when we're in our busy time, which is right now, and he doesn't get home until 7pm. I work two days a week for a local gardening company, but apart from that I'm home with the kids.
For the past six months or so we've implemented quite a set routine. The kids have dinner really early - pretty much as soon as they get home from school and kindy around 3.30pm. I made the change to this because it was getting to the point where I was finding the evenings really stressful. With Russell getting home late, he's not there to help with dinner, bath time, or getting the kids ready for bed. The kids would come home from school starving, and I'd make them afternoon tea, then they'd still want more - and more - to eat. Then come dinnertime, they wouldn't eat. I thought, "What could we do to make this less stressful?" and an earlier dinner seemed to make sense.
I either cook a meal just for the kids in the middle of the day, or sometimes they get leftovers from the night before. We use a lot of home-kill from the freezer, so I need to be organised the day before with what I'm cooking anyway - you need to be getting your kilo of mince out the night before to start defrosting. The meal is already ready by the time the kids come home. They're not super interested in helping out in the kitchen to be honest - although Ted does like to help make breakfast in the mornings.
The home-kill we have at the moment was an old dairy cow, so it's mince and sausages, and we also have a couple of pigs that we get meat from. Usually the dinner I cook for the kids is the basis for the dinner I cook for me and Russell. The kids aren't into spicy food or anything too out there so they might have a plainer version of what we have - the main part, the protein, is usually the same. So they might have sausages with vegetables, whereas we might have a sausage curry or something a bit more flavoursome. But I'm not standing at the stove cooking a whole other meal usually. In saying that, Russell really loves quite simple food - his dream dinner would be a corned beef with mashed potato!
Giving the kids their dinner early frees up the rest of the afternoon because the main meal is done. Before, I'd get to 4.30pm and I'd start worrying about having to start prepping dinner and how the rest of the evening would go. Now I'm sort of like, "We've got heaps of time!" because dinner's done. I don't really get hungry when the kids are eating - I'd much rather wait to be able to sit down and eat in peace than eat with them to be honest. By five, Ron is really tired and clingy and there's no way it would be enjoyable sitting down to try and have dinner at that time. The kids are all pretty much on the same schedule for going to bed around 6.30pm. By the time Russell and I sit down to dinner, the kids are fast asleep.
The ideal would be that we all sit down and eat dinner together but the reality is that with the hours that Russell works, that wouldn't work for us; and when you're doing the dinner, bath, bed on your own you just have to make it as easy as you can - that's what I've figured. This is what I've found works best for us.
Before we were doing it this way, we'd have tea around 5-5.30pm but the baby would have to eat earlier, so I was kind of making three meals. On top of that I would've made maybe four different afternoon snacks between three and four-thirty - so you might think it sounds like more work making two meals and feeding the kids early, but I've found it is actually less work. Before, I felt like the kids were hassling me for food all afternoon. That's not to say they don't ask for snacks later in the afternoon now. But I know that they've had their good meal, so if they are hungry at 4.30 or 5pm then it's fine for them to have some fruit or something. They don't always need that late snack, but most nights they might have an apple, or if I'm feeling generous they might have some ice cream. We definitely don't do dessert every night.
They're always hungry when they come home from school - a lack of appetite at that time is never a problem. My son gets free lunches at school, so I know he gets a proper lunch there but he comes home and he's starving! I also find that with dinnertime being earlier, they're in a better state of mind to want to try new things and they're open to having whatever is being served - they're not grumpy, tired, and over it and just demanding a sandwich instead of what's on the plate. We're having less battles over eating what's served up now - they're hungry and in a better headspace.
I pretty much take the line that what's served up for dinner is what we're having - you don't have to eat it all, but we're not having anything else. I don't pressure them to finish the whole plate, I just let them eat what they want and leave what they don't want. I do mostly give them 'safe' foods that I know they'll want to eat so that dinnertime is a good experience. I feel like the whole angry-mum-at-dinnertime thing would probably be more harmful than them just having food that they're comfortable with. But I do try new things with them - there might be two things I know they'll eat and one new thing on their plates, just to get them exposed to different things. The more you expose your kids to new things the more willing they'll be to try them.
On the weekends we still stick to the same sort of routine with dinner. Although in the holidays we'd often do a bigger lunch all together, and then the kids might have dinner around 4.30pm. I guess people know how hard Russell works, so they know that if they invite us to dinner at 5pm we're just not able to come, so when we do get together with friends it's usually us having them round to our place.
Holly Swansson, 40, her husband Matt and their three daughters, Eva, 9, Tessa, 8, and Gemma, 4, live on the Pahiatua Track between Te Papa-i-Oea Palmerston North and Pahiatua.
We have a dry stock farm here, and we also lease a dairy farm and runoff at Mangatainoka, about a twenty-five-minute drive away. Matt's a local from Tararua; he was sharemilking when I first met him. I'm from a sheep and beef farm in Masterton. Matt's on the dairy farm twice a day at this busy time of year, as well as doing farm work here during the day. The kids take the bus to school most days and the little one is at day care three days a week during school hours - my neighbour and I carpool when we can.
Matt's alarm goes off around 4am and he's out the door after a coffee. He comes back from the first visit to the dairy farm about 8.30am and has his proper breakfast before he heads off again, then heads back to the dairy farm around 1.30pm. I worked at AgResearch for ten years but I gave that up when Covid hit. Now I'm working on growing my native plant nursery while helping Matt on the farm.
Our older two kids are close in age - there's seventeen months between them. They fight like crazy but then they're also best friends. I try to get them to bed about 8-8.30pm; often they like to watch something like The Block after Gemma goes to bed about 7.30pm, or earlier if she's tired enough.
I try to serve dinner between 5.30 and 6.30pm - normally it's around 6pm or a bit before as the little one starts to get really hungry and raids the freezer for peas and asks for cucumber and carrot sticks. Usually Matt is in about 6pm unless he's run into any problems - so he's there for us to all sit down together and eat, which is nice. If he's not home by then we just go ahead and eat.
Some days the kids have after-school activities in town, so either I would've already cooked dinner at lunchtime or it's a crockpot meal, or Matt just has to do easy stuff like boil something - he is competent in the kitchen if we need him to cook a full meal, though. If we have activities in town, the girls are always ravenous when we get home. I try not to let dinner start late, even 6.30pm it means all the other things get pushed out and there's not enough wind-down time after dinner.
I have a quite large veggie garden, and sometimes I haven't got meat out of the freezer in time so it's a trip to the garden in the evening to pick things out for dinner. I used to meal-plan but after a few weeks it would always get thrown out the window because something happens or I forget to get meat out. We've got a lot of bush up the back of our place so there's always venison, and we rear some pigs as well as beef, so we do have a good supply of meat! It sounds like a good thing but I'm not ashamed to say I find it a struggle - the mental block of not knowing what to pick for dinner, and I'm sometimes putting frozen chops in the oven, or a frozen roast in at 1pm!
I try to make sure we are all eating well, putting good food on the table. I was never a big veggie-eater as a kid - it was always meat and spud - so I've had to change my eating ways to encourage my kids to eat veggies. I can't stand boiled cauliflower, carrot or broccoli. I like to experiment with what comes out of our garden and a lot of things we like raw. I google recipes based on what veggies I have available in the garden. The kids generally aren't fussy eaters - the middle child is a little funny about some textures of meat and some veggies, but still she is a way better eater than most, I'd say.
Gemma likes to come down to the garden with me to pick stuff, and likes to chew on purple sprouting broccoli. We've given vegetables certain names to help them get excited about what we're pulling out of the garden. Miner's lettuce is 'stingrays', for example. I make a point of not eating most things out of season (so no fresh tomatoes in winter), which means I have to get a bit creative when making a salad from the garden. The kids also like to help decide what we're having for dinner, and they're often keen to help with cooking. Whatever I make for dinner I often try to make enough for Matt's breakfast - in winter and spring when he comes in for breakfast he likes to have something warm.
We sit at the dinner table; we always have. After major renovations last year we have an open-plan kitchen and a good flow to the dining table. I always ask if there's any news from school, we talk about who they played with, what the little one had for lunch at day care. I update Matt on whatever has happened that afternoon. Sometimes Matt wants to have the news on the TV, which is usually a disaster because there's so much noise at the table! Sometimes we watch a bit of The Chase, which is on beforehand - the kids are into that, they like the questions.
In the weekends, tea is a little bit later. It's all a bit more relaxed.
This story is part of THREAD, a year-long project by Shepherdess made possible thanks to the Public Interest Journalism Fund through NZ On Air.
If you enjoyed this story, please share with someone else.
Get your hands on a copy of Shepherdess.
Related Stories
The young primary school kaiako using pottery to raise awareness for mental health and suicide prevention
Bella highlights the importance of te ao and te reo Māori in her job in education, and raises funds and awareness for mental health through her project Have a Cuppa.
Orchard overload: when life gives you a plethora of pears, make craft gin
When Nikki and her partner stumbled upon their dream house on the banks of the Whanganui River, they found themselves the proud owners of a large pear orchard.
The Gin Genie
Nestled amongst the spectacular Paparoa and Victoria ranges, Reefton is home to the eponymous Reefton Distilling Co., founded by local Patsy Bass.