Back in the summer, we were playing one day over at the Carl Sagans, and Young Carl and his siblings were having sunflower seeds for a snack. I had recently read that sunflower seeds were a great snack because they contain Omega-whatevers and other crap that’s good for you, and all the Mothers Of Quality were serving them, yadda yadda. So I offered some to my own kids, and they both loved them immediately.

Unfortunately, these were the kind of sunflower seeds that had been shelled and roasted without a shell, which means that some kind of oil was involved in the roasting process. And in this particular case, the oil was peanut oil. So this little event quickly went from, “Hey, new food discovery!” to, “Oh boy…looks like the Captain is still allergic to peanuts. Oops.” On the plus side, Gal Smiley ate about a million of them and was not sick in any way, so looks like she is not allergic to peanuts. Or anything else, for that matter — she is by far our healthiest kid. I think we were due for some medical karma.

Anyway, since then, we have been searching for sunflower seeds that are nut-free, and last week, I found these at the Superstore, made in Canada in a nut-free facility. Yay!

The drawback, though, is that they are still in their shells. And apparently, you aren’t supposed to eat the shell part, Gal Smiley.

So for the past two days, Sir Monkeypants and I have been spending approximately 50% of our time shelling sunflower seeds. Yesterday evening after the kids were in bed I spent two hours shelling. I had a swollen upper lip from cutting it on the edges of the seeds, and I’d ingested about a month’s worth of salt. Both of my thumbnails are black underneath and sore from slipping my too-short nail into the little cracks. And all this effort, all this work, all this time, yielded…two tablespoons of shelled seeds.

Which the kids ate in about…oh, 10 minutes. And then they asked for more.

Sir Monkeypants searched online yesterday but could only find brands that had shells, that were nut-free. At the Superstore, there’s only the shelled kind. There must be a better way!

Memo to self: invent sunflower seed sheller. Make millions. Career problem solved!