The other day I made a meal that I have made many times before – chicken shishkabobs for the BBQ. Usually this meal results in leftover lunch for both me and Sir Monkeypants, and maybe a little more than that, too. This week it was all gone. All of it!
This sounds like a minor thing but in our house of very small children with teeny tiny appetites and multiple food allergies, it is a major victory. I used to have this story I liked to tell, about reading an article in a magazine when my oldest was a baby about a lady with three teenaged boys who went through two loaves of bread A DAY. I mentally geared myself up for such a time, but we have never, ever come close to that. In fact, we often have freshly baked bread languishing on the counter, and the kids sometimes bring home uneaten lunches. Including the cookies. Like, who can’t even muster up the appetite to eat the cookies? SIGH.
So, the fact that the entire dinner got eaten is big news. All three kids ate well but the biggest change is that our oldest, Captain Jelly Belly, smallest person in his high school, may finally be hitting a growth spurt. That’s so awesome it makes me want to cry, so I will just leave it there and try to stop lurking near him several times a day so I can compare his height to mine.
Speaking of food, this is the time of year when I always feel the need to write a post on a theme of Lunch Making Blues, and how trying to find something to put in the kids’ lunches is sucking away my will to live. I’m hanging in there this year, but this year more than any other I am really pushing the scheduling part of making lunches.
I usually get up around 6:15 in the morning, and wander downstairs and check my mail and fool around on Facebook, with a firm deadline of 7 a.m. for heading to the kitchen to tidy up and empty the dishwasher and make lunches. For the past few weeks that schedule has been slipping and sliding, so that I’m often still fooling around on Facebook at 7:15, leaving myself a scant 20 minutes to pull three lunches together. But I have been doing it, with the aid of prepackaged crap and lots of cookies. It’s only encouraging me, which is not good.
Only four weeks left. I think I can get lunch making down to 10 minutes if Starburst counts as a fruit. It does, right?
And speaking of endings, tonight is my last Girl Guide meeting of the year. I know it’s crazy, but I have signed up for one more year, because Little Miss Sunshine wanted me to, and the other part-time leader was going to leave if I did, and I didn’t want her to leave, so I caved. So this is not my last Girl Guide meeting ever (May 2019, you and I have a date with a wine bottle!), but it does mean at least a couple of months of no thinking about Girl Guides, which is awesome.
I have to say, I am feeling rather proud of myself for getting through this Year Of Guides and for doing a good job and for hanging in there. I know it was hard on my family and I have been cranky a lot of the time and I had to go camping. But I did it, and I dealt with a lot of crazy stuff, and I managed some difficult situations, and I did a lot of crafts, and I survived. I’m not sure I would recommend it, but as Ladies Of A Certain Age we so rarely get a chance to do something new and hard and to point to something concrete like this and say, “I did that. I made a difference.” So that’s a good thing.
TurtleHead 
Good for you for staying with Guides – it’s a big thing to those girls, I’m sure. Also, I am so glad to hear of the growth spurt. My husband was a smaller kid and ended up having a growth spurt AFTER high school. He was always kind of small, apparently, and he is now 5’11” and 185 pounds (he lifts weights, omg, super hot). So kids hit their growth spurts at all different times, I guess. I frequently talk about how much time I spend cooking, grocery shopping, baking, and how food disappears in my house, but I won’t complain because I remember when J was on the TENTH percentile for weight and how stressful that was. I am basically everyone’s Nonna/ Oma/ Bubba now “eat, eat! You’re too skinny, eat!”
I thought I had just enjoyed my final moments with an organization, but things organizationally have changed and now here I sit getting sucked back in for another year. At least. I think. Ugh. Also I want to give you all the props in the world for making lunches even still. Both my girls make their own now and I definitely celebrated with a bottle of wine. Lunches are the worst.
How awesome you’re going to do Guides again! Memories will be made by all, I’m sure. You dedicated so much time and effort, from what little you said here. 🙂
We have the exact same morning schedule. Except on track day when girl child has to leave earlier…but the lunch thing will be the end of me. How many more days? Why won’t they make their own lunch? Do we even have anything other than Easter chocolate they can eat for lunch?
BLAH.
Lynn: I read your blog regularly. With all the challenges you face in your daily life, I am filled with admiration for all the extra activities you take on and which you accomplish with grace and humour. Your children will enjoy untold benefits from having such a dedicated Mother. Congratulations.
I hear you! I feel ridiculously happy when the food cooked is eaten. And I don’t make giant portions! I don’t believe in the “finish it no matter what” either. But yeah, feeding your kid(s), no matter how old, is kind of satisfying. Must be a biological need…
Dude, your oldest two are 15 and 14. They can make their own lunches (even if you have to review and approve). LittleSis had Hman making his lunches over a year ago!
I would be SUPER impressed and admiring that you’re doing Guides again (that you did it at all) even if you’d made the crappiest, laziest showing ever, and I know you did not. And so so happy for you and CJB about the growth spurt. And just ignore M., we still make lunches for Angus and Eve and dude is 18, it’s ridiculous, whatever, leave us alone.
Great news re the growth spurt…we now have 2 teenaged boys eating constantly! I am so jealous. as for Girl Guides, huge yay for you! I loved Guides and went right through to Pathfinders. My boys did Beavers and Cubs but it was so disorganized we eventually gave it up. as for school lunches.. I gave that up when they started middle school! but we all need to do what works in our own families.. just ask our dear friend, bilbiomama2, who will be delivering her son’s lunch to university next year 🙂 lol…….. couldn’t resist!
when I say “I am so jealous”……. I mean that my son’s can eat constantly , and I …… cannot.
I make lunches for mine, too (14 and 16). I do it for all kinds of weird reasons – mostly because it gives me a huge feeling of satisfaction to send them to school with healthy lunches. The main thing for me is they know how to make their own food. I don’t do it because they CAN’T – I do it because I want to. And, soon enough, I won’t be able to anymore because they’ll be at university …