The Queen's Rambles

Erik refuses to eat his lunch at school. He refuses to eat the school lunch, which is totally fine with me because I wouldn’t want him eating that crap anyway. But he now refuses to eat anything I send him either. Sandwiches get squished. Cereal bars get crumbly. Cheese, vegetables, fruit, pepperoni, etc gets “dried out.” Whole fruit like apples and clementines get a turned up nose. He won’t eat nuts. Go-gurt (which I hate on principal because it is disgusting to slurp food out of a plastic tube) is “probably bad and will make me sick” even if I freeze it and send it in with an ice pack and it’s still cold. At least he knows something about food safety?

The mac and cheese and pasta that he used to eat every day with no problems is now “just not good.” Which. . . .ok, I was not happy that all he was eating was carbs. I want him to eat some carrot sticks or apple slices!

I’ve tried sending in leftovers of meals that he’s gobbled up the night before and said was the “best thing I ever ate!” Those come back with nary a nibble taken out of them.

I ask him “aren’t you hungry in the afternoons?” and he admits he is. I hate thinking of him sitting there, starving. I know it makes him grouchy, so he’s probably a real pleasure to deal with.

I asked him what I could send and he gave me completely unrealistic responses: A box of cookies, a whole loaf of homemade bread (I would be more than happy to send him slices, but he says slices get squished in his lunch. And a whole loaf wouldn’t? Is he just going to tear in to it like a neanderthal? They wouldn’t let him have a metal fork in his lunch box, how are they going to let him have a big ol’ bread knife?), or steak. Because every 8 year old needs a steady diet of steak. I would not mind sending him steak in his thermos sometimes, but who can afford a daily ration of steak? We’re not living in Downtown. If we were we’d have private tutors.

And now Elsa is having a complete meltdown tantrum that I can’t even deal with. She handed me the packing from a band-aid, so I threw it away. And now she is screaming and crying and going through the trash saying “I want garbage! I want garbage!” What a cruel mother I am.