I usually make DD’s school lunch. A couple of sandwiches, a piece of fresh fruit and something else – some cheese, dried fruit, a muffin, maybe some chocolate covered whatevers. Preferably something healthy but it doesn’t have to be macrobiotic Pritikin-inspired vegan goodness. It doesn’t even have to be vegetarian even though I am a vegetarian myself. DD had a run of liverwurst sandwiches because I felt it was something she should at least try.
DD has been dying to buy something at the canteen. Its a big thing for a not quite 5 year old Transition girl and last week I gave her enough change that she could buy a treat on top of whatever else was in her lunchbox. She bought noodles and an icy cup and still ate her sandwich and fruit so all was well.
So on Friday when I realised that I was not as organised as I had hoped and there wasn’t much that was interesting in the fridge AND it was the day after Payday, I though I would let Hanna buy her lunch. I have the list of canteen goodies here so we went through it. I did the great “You need to have a sandwich or roll and a piece of fruit” and we discussed the different fillings. So Hanna wanted an egg sandwich and fruit and cake. I was happy for her to spend up to $5 so she could add to that if she wished.
So I found an envelope, wrote her name on it, and wrote on it what we had decided on and put the money in. Before I kissed her goodbye I reminded her she needed to have a sandwich and a piece of fruit. You can’t do too much brainwashing about these things.
At school, she bowled up to the teacher [a different one than usual] and showed her the envelope as the teachers collect the lunch money. Now I made the assumption that there was some kind of order system. I should learn not to do that.
So fast forward to afterschool care and Hanna shows me a sticker she got out of a packet of Kettle chips. OK, she bought chips for the treat part of her lunch. I’m not going to fault that especially as I did exactly the same thing that day. First time in months but when the urge comes on for salt and vinegar chips, it needs to be followed.
So I ask her if she liked her sandwich and what kind of fruit she had. She didn’t have any.
Excuse me?
Yep, she didn’t have the carefully planned sandwich, the piece of fruit and everything else as extras. She bought a bag of chips and JUST a packet of chips.
Bloody hell. And it was the one day that the kids were not given their communication books back and I really, really wanted to ask about how the lunch system operates as obviously I’ve got it all wrong. So Hanna won’t be allowed to have bought lunches because she is too young to be responsible [and that's not her fault, she is just a kid] and I can’t trust what she orders. But I won’t have her eating crap food and running out of steam in the afternoons. That’s what happened to her Dad because his Mum thought that he was big enough to make his own breakfast and could be trusted with buying his lunch. The reality is that he rarely ate breakfast, used to buy lollies with his lunch money and run out of steam by mid-morning and couldn’t think because his brain did not have the right nutrients passing through it.
So I’ll be asking how the system works in great detail.
To top it off when I asked Hanna where her change was, knowing she should have had about $3.70, she went rushing over to the table and then came back all upset because her money had disappeared. My sweet naive young miss found out the hard way that you can’t leave money lying around. So she copped a mini-lecture on putting money away in her schoolbag.
