The School Lunch

I get tired of it sometimes, but I make pretty good school lunches.

The kids usually have a quesadilla or a pizza bagel (home made). They might get chicken fingers (real white meat) or pepperoni sticks or even mini meatballs now and then. I make sure there is something sweet (often home baked) and of course, the obligatory fruit. I mix it up, though, and make sure that in addition to the rarely-eaten apple, there are dried mango slices (Micah) and a Sun Rype Fruit Bar. When treats are low, I've popped popcorn in the morning and put that in. Because of a "dry day," we found out that marshmallows are like the crack cocaine of the schoolyard. You can trade them for anything. Popcorn isn't bad either.

Today, Micah told me that he often eats a friend's sandwich. This is a little hard for me to imagine... it always grossed me out to eat other people's food at lunch time. I don't know why, but I think it still would. Both my kids, however, are perfectly willing to eat whatever is on the table, so to speak. Joey will come home and say that he ate all the leftover pizza crusts on pizza day, or that he got a bunch of sealed applesauce mini servings off the "don't want to eat it table" (apparently there is a table with uneaten food in their lunch room to prevent the disposal of "perfectly good" food).

Yuck.

Anyway, Micah said that this particular sandwich is made of cheap white bread, some sort of salami-type meat, and that the mustard kind of soaks into the bread. If it has a "spread" you can bet it's the nasty kind of margarine.

You know the kind of sandwich we're talking about.

In Micah's words, it's one of those things that would make you feel sick if you had to eat it all the time, but if you never get it, there's something "strangely satisfying" about it.

I think I should just pack him a big bag of marshmallows and save myself a whole lot of trouble.