why i hate making lunches...

There are, of course, worse experiences to experience, but that said, making lunches has got to be the most painful, expensive, and loathsome task. I wish I could love setting out their lunchboxes and lovingly installing in them wholesome and delicious snacks and lunches that they would then devour during snack and lunchtime, and that afterwards, they'd feel refreshed and energized and ready to learn (or ready to learn to share, sing new songs, sit in circle, and play nicely with their friends). Also, they would use the napkin I'd carefully folded and included with their lunch and not the hem of their shirt, dress, or sleeve.



This is pure fantasy.

First there are a lot of restrictions. All three schools (yes, three schools and I don't want to talk about it) are kosher and lunches need to be dairy. Also, no peanuts because of nut allergies. So already, we're little stuck. Plus, Samuel doesn't like cheese or dairy or tofu. Or bread. Just meat and peanut butter.

Usually, I get to daycare and Naomi's teacher will say something to me like, "Hmm, so strange... Naomi ate absolutely nothing today except for a few bites of yogurt. And she seemed to totally hate her sandwich." (Nevermind that during the weekend she gobbled down two of the exact same sandwich, but I digress...)

Tali will politely say, "You know, I just didn't have time to eat everything." Which is sweet, and I can take pride in the fact that the girl has some good manners developing, But she managed to have time to eat her chocolate chip cookie (baked with bran and flax seed, mind you. I'm not sending complete crap in their lunches). Just not the avocado and cheese sandwich that she loves at home.

And I've tried thermos bowls of soup or noodles or rice and veggies... I've tried veggie sushi, burritos, bagels, everything. But when you get all that hard work returned to you at the end of the day untouched, except that it's now sort of smelly and squished, it's just degrading. Maybe that's too strong of a word for it, but it's just not nice.

Samuel is my one lunchbox success story. I've found out that the one way to get protein into Samuel for lunches is to give him eggs. The kid has never met an egg he didn't want to eat (and this has actually been an issue when we had to discuss why hardboiled eggs should never be stored for "just in case" in your backpack). The kid has a good appetite and if I give him two eggs, or an egg salad sandwich, he's really set. However, that means that I have to make the egg salad or hard boil the eggs, which isn't all that difficult, but at the end of a seemingly endless day, sometimes this happens:







These are eggs that have been hardboiled for two hours while I got distracted by watching "You Suck at Photoshop" videos on YouTube with Boaz and then folding laundry and then answering some email and then working on a deck I needed to do for work. Note the fact that all of the water has been boiled down. Note the fact that the pot has burned profusely and is pretty much ruined. Note the fact that I used the last four eggs from the carton.

Samuel had a cheese sandwich for lunch today. I can't wait to see it again tonight.