Nourishing my family is everything
Amanda with her babies and dog!
In my series on motherhood I want to portray the diversity of the motherhood experience and what it means to be a mother now. I’m interested in telling stories through other mamas to give insight into their approach to motherhood, be it their struggles, triumphs, their deepest feelings, how they have evolved and grown, perhaps how they raise their children connected to nature and live with a light footprint or how they approach mothering consciously.
I want to portray the essence of motherhood in every family’s unique language and am evolving this series to now encompass how we nourish and feed ourselves and our families, sharing the hands, earth and hearts that feed us.
Today I am sharing Amanda’s story. She lives in Christchurch, New Zealand with her lovely wee family of five.
All photos by Charlotte, Olive & Pop
We try really hard to eat wholefoods the best we can. Cooking and shopping with high food and living costs is really hard in today’s world! We are currently doing Bargain Box for dinner, as I’ve found planning the hardest with twins and a toddler! I add extra people so we have lunches for the next day as well.
Self care is SO hard as a mama of multiples, but it’s so important. The more time I take to do self care, the better I can be for everyone else. It’s been a real struggle to get free time to myself being a mum with 3 under 3 . I do sunrise walks, workouts at home, meditations, coffee dates and making sure I immerse myself in nature as much as possible for self care.
Nourishing my family is everything. My mom always told me that if you are in charge of the food in the household, then you are in charge of health- and I totally get it now! We try really hard to encourage a connection to nature and the food we eat, to be immersed in nature as much as possible. We encourage our oldest son to help plant our garden so he can really appreciate the whole process. Our whole winter veg garden was planted by my own mama and my son.
Luckily, I grew up with a positive relationship with food. I was a gymnast, so it’s a miracle that I came out with a healthy relationship - but I owe that all to my mom. She taught me about using food as fuel and taught me to appreciate organic, healthy food. I’ve been a salad queen my whole life and genuinely love it. She did a lot of research to figure out how to fuel an elite athlete, as well. She was the key!
We do ‘gratefuls’ at dinner every single night. It’s a real part of the dinner time family bonding, and it is such a wonderful time to hear what my son is happy about in his life. Also, the last grateful for my husband and I had to be something highlighting each other.
When we’re talking about food with our children we try to make sure we don’t use pressure or labels for food (ie, bad food versus good food). With that, we have a very picky 3 year old, and we have had our share of muck ups with that! We are learning with him as we go.
How do we approach food waste!? Our dog does a lot of our extra cleaning ;) We want to do our own compost, too!
Amanda with her babies