and already I'm bored of making lunches. I spend a good part of one of my Sunday afternoons baking for the upcoming week in a futile attempt to keep my kids in muffins, cookies, bars, etc. Here's just a short list of what I've made over the past two weeks:
snickerdoodles, chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies, zucchini chocolate chip muffins, rhubarb muffins, 2 lemon loaves, dream bars....yada yada yada.
One child will only eat cheese sandwiches, although he will eat muffins instead of a sandwich in his lunch.
One child will eat anything but peanut butter sandwiches.
One child will eat most things in her lunch, except for the apples. (Great - we live on an apple orchard.)
Then, once they get home from school the feeding frenzy begins! One child will head straight to the Wii for his 30 minutes of game time without eating. One heads straight to the pantry when she gets home for cookies/muffins/whatever. She can never seem to grasp the point that it's not a race to see who can get to the snacks first and who can consume them the quickest. The third one is usually at the fridge staring into the great abyss wondering why "There's nothing to eat." When I suggest yogurt, fruit, cut up veggies, etc. her response is "Nah, I don't want anything cold." "Then why are you looking in the fridge?"
The rule in our house is that all snacking must be completed by 4 pm. Despite my warnings of "30 minutes until the kitchen closes" or "15 minutes left for snacks" and of course my final "last call for snacks", my son will still appear at 5 pm whining about how hungry he is cause he didn't know snack time was over at 4. (The 4 pm rule has been in place since he started school). Then the whining continues if his older sister gets to eat a sandwich at five because she's heading out to soccer game in 20 minutes.
Finally it's dinner time around 6 pm and my poor starving son gets to eat. Last night's dinner was roasted chicken, boiled potatoes, rutabaga and salad. My son takes one chicken drumstick on his plate and sits at the table. Then he's up again to get a drink of milk. Then he sits down again. Then he gets up again because he didn't put the milk away. But his chicken is still too hot to eat, so I tell him to have some salad while he's waiting for his chicken to cool down. He has to get up, get another napkin and wipe off his plate with the napkin to clear off a space for the salad to land. You see, he can't have his salad touching his chicken. Then he gets up again because his favorite salad dressing is still in the fridge. Then back to the table to apply the dressing to his salad. Finally the chicken is cool enough to eat, but instead of picking it up and eating it with his fingers he picks little pieces off bit by bit and eats them. When the chicken is finished he gets up to put the bones in the garbage and to get another napkin to wipe any trace of chicken off his plate. Now it's on to the salad. He'll eat all the tomatoes in the salad, then all the carrots, then the cucumber, then the lettuce. Unfortunately for him I had added green onions to this salad so he had to pick all those out and get up and put them in the garbage.
Thank heaven my other two kids aren't like this. They eat pretty much anything that's put in front of them, although my oldest daughter likes ketchup on the strangest things. Oh and every meal usually involves her performing a version or two of whatever she's listening to that day.
Yes, dinner and a show are common place at my house.
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