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Our LO goes to bed around 8:30-9 (18 months old), I get home around 6 and have dinner done around 7-7:30 and she eats with us. It's hard but we have no other choice.

When LO was younger he would eat dinner around 5:30, and that was too early for me to be able to put dinner on the table for all of us. Now dinner starts around 6:00, and that half an hour makes such a big difference. I am usually able to get dinner ready for us so that we have an early dinner. I stay at home and have more flexibility with cooking than if I were working and came home with only an hour to prep and cook a meal. I look up to parents who are able to work and cook a homemade meal during the week. It's a lot of hard work.

We all eat together around 6 or 6:30.

We eat together at 6-6:30. Bedtime is 8.

We're on a similar schedule to you. DD and I are home a little after 5:30, and DH doesn't get home until 6:45. Bedtime for DD starts at 7 PM, so dinner as a family almost never works. I usually just feed DD her dinner when I get her home from daycare, and DH and I eat dinner after she goes to bed, usually around 8-ish. I know at some point in the future we'll have to figure out how to make family dinner time work, but that probably won't happen realistically until she starts having a later bedtime.

We're lucky because we're on the west coast and both my husband and I work east coast hours. So we're able to eat dinner together every night at 5:30.