September 4, 2012

• What’s for lunch?

  Last night, after cleaning up from a Labor Day barbecue and tucking the kids in for the night, I strolled into the kitchen to resume the nightly school year ritual of packing lunches. I had started planning the day before, because I had little packable lunch food left in the house, after a summer of avoiding grocery shopping whenever remotely possible. I decided that I would get up on Labor Day morning and drive to the bagel shop, where I could get breakfast for that day and lunch for the next. A brilliant move on my part. (In a lazy sort of way, since you’ll see that I avoided cooking breakfast AND going to the grocery store, in one fell swoop.)

  So I got out the bagels and the desired spreads. I wrapped them in foil with notes written on each for the first day of school. (I rarely use foil – I prefer reusable stuff, but more on that later. The foil served the dual role of wrapping the sandwiches and serving as a writing surface.) Next, I opened the cabinet where I keep the lunch boxes. It’s a new cabinet, since our kitchen remodel. I never used to have a place to keep the lunch boxes, except on top of the fridge. That’s why I’m so certain that the lunch boxes should have been there.

  They were not.

  Hmmmm. Do I have a vague memory of taking them out and asking our daughter to put them somewhere out of the way? I do, but I am immediately convinced that it is a fabricated memory. Why would they be in the way, in their very own special cabinet place?

  I began rummaging around the upper and lower cabinets in that spot. And then in all the other spots. And in the pantry, the laundry room, the coat closet, the kids’ closets, and even some truly nonsensical places like in the fridge. (You never know, maybe I had already made lunches that morning and blocked it out?) After a few rounds around the dark crevices of our house, the Mr. suggested that I ask our daughter, who knows where everything is at all times.

  She remembered that the last time the lunch boxes were used was when the kids took an art class, for which they had to pack lunch. This was in early August, when I was on my took-the-train-to-get-there trip and my mom was in charge of the kids. Our daughter packed the lunches, and she said she was sure they had brought the lunch boxes home. However, she said this second part in a not-very-convincing voice. I called my mom, who remembered the chaos of leaving the art class with multiple wet canvases and children covered in paint. She didn’t remember seeing the lunch boxes. Had she seen them, she most certainly would have cleaned them in a manner far superior to what I would have done. And then she would have put them away….because that’s what she does. She puts things away. Always.

  At this point, it was 8:30pm on Labor Day. And yet, amazingly, the art school was open for a private painting party that was just ending. The head-artist-on-duty agreed to wait for me to arrive, and she said she had our lime green and navy blue lunch boxes in her pile of abandoned lunch boxes. (You’ve got to figure this happens a lot, what with all the wet paint and messy kids and confusion and such.)

  I made it there in time, and rescued the long lost lunch boxes. The Mr. had previously agreed to be the one to open them and disinfect whatever mess we might find in them upon their return home. They were surprisingly barren. Meaning that things were missing – reusable water bottles and nifty inserts for holding the actual food. Well, our son’s was missing, but our daughter’s was there. And not gross – so that’s a plus.

  All is fine now. I bought new water bottles (which were 30% off up until yesterday, when our entire family stood in front of the display at REI and admired the good price, but didn’t get any because we didn’t know we needed them then).  I also ordered a new lunch box insert. It’s funny, because while I was on my trip (and my kids were simultaneously losing their lunch boxes), I was telling my friend about how great these inserts were for packing. She asked me to send her a link on where to get them when I got home. (We were shopping in a boutique of funky kitchen supplies in an up and coming neighborhood in D.C. when this extremely lame conversation took place. For real. So that makes it a little less lame, no?)

  So when I went looking for the link, I discovered that the 2 mom operation from whom I had purchased the insert seemed to have gone out of business. You could get the inserts on Amazon, but I told my friend to hurry up, because it seemed like they weren’t making them anymore. I’d link them for you now, because they are awesome…..but I bought the very last one on Amazon today. Whew!

  Tonight’s lunch packing went much more smoothly. I put the kids to work making their own sandwiches while I rinsed out the new water bottles. 

  They had a great first day of school, and so did I. We were all visibly refreshed by our return to structure. There wasn’t a single fight around here after school and the kids did everything I asked of them, with no complaint. And I remembered to ask them to do more for themselves, since they weren’t busy rotting their brain cells all day.

  I heart school.

  Remind me of that when I start griping about homework, ok?

  • 8:32 pm
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