School’s out for summer! You think we’re more jazzed about the no more pencils, the no more books, or the no more teachers’ dirty looks? None of the above! We’re delirious we don’t have to face that wanker known as School Lunch for 75 days!

 

Ellen: Seventy-five days seems so short! Not. Enough. Time.

Erin:  Holy Ziploc! We will be bagging Oreos again before you know it.

Ellen: School lunches are like Groundhog Day and Sisyphus pushing the boulder endlessly up the mountain all rolled up into one.

And yet I willingly pack them for my 12 and 14 year old girls who are perfectly capable of doing it themselves. It’s kind of my love letter to them.

Erin: Complete with a sweet message tucked inside?

Ellen: To my middle schooler and high schooler? Are you mad? Hell hath no fury like a teenager embarrassed. I may have done it once or twice when they were younger, but I wouldn’t be able to handle the scorn now. Besides, let’s get back to the original topic: I can barely get the actual lunches packed in the morning.

Erin: Don’t accuse me of trampling on your token of motherly love, but you could pack them at night. Surely, you have room in your refrigerator for two lunches. It’s not like my household where the lunch equation is 5 kids + 2 adults = a freakin’ fridge in the garage to accommodate them.

Ellen: Damn, that has to cut into the cost advantage of packing a lunch.

Erin: But we don’t have a choice! The school that  most of my kids go to does not sell lunch regularly. On those occasions it does, I wish it didn’t. Fuster cluck, it’s what’s for lunch.

You see, you have to order hot lunch a month or more in advance. When I have succumbed to the delusion that this is actually helpful and have forked over the small fortune for it, I completely forget which day they are serving the hot lunch and end up sending lunches in anyway.

I’m a lost cause, but why don’t your kids just buy?

Ellen: Breadsticks as an entree. Is this enough said? Apparently the smear of  marinara and microgram of cheese elevate this nasty simple little carbohydrate to full meal status. It’s a shame.

I rarely travel to the land of martyrdom, so it’s kind of hilarious I do it over a Chobani.

Erin: You might douse the tragic soundtrack and sidestep falling on that sword just yet. My kids pack their own lunches, and I don’t think it is any less work. In one of those parenting moments where it sounds better in your head than in actual practice, we have a lunch-making schedule where teams of two kids make all seven lunches for the next day.

Oh, they’ll learn teamwork, we foolishly thought. Oh, they’ll bond with each other over shared chores, we innocently dreamed.

Ellen: I’ve seen the lunch assembly line in action on vacation. Don’t hold your breath for an Erin’s Pearls of Wisdom parenting book deal just yet.

Erin: I am not gonna sugarcoat it for you. It only works 20% of the time. The other 4 days of the week, we cajole, plead, beg, steal, and borrow to get the little darlings to work together cohesively and effectively. Sometimes they work together beautifully, but the lunches end up being a Slim Jim and an apple. Nobody’s gonna starve, but it took you 45 minutes for that?

Other times, we have to pry a child out of his brother’s sleeper hold over a missed  turn to spread the jelly. It is not an exaggeration to say that we have WWF worthy smackdowns over fruit cups either. Apparently, nobody likes the peaches. What the hell is wrong with peaches?

And every time–Every. SINGLE. Time.—one of them is screaming at the top of his lungs,  “Where is your lunch box?” It’s paradise here on the ranch, I tell ya.

Ellen: Sooooooo, packing them myself doesn’t seem so bad. But I do have one last stab at martyrdom. My 14 year old often brings her lunch bag home looking like this:

Erin: GAH! That is a petri dish! Forget your martyrdom bonfire, burn that thing in effigy.

Ellen: No worries! This is the last known picture of that horror before it went into the trash. At least I don’t have to think about lunches again until the end of August.

Erin: You still have to feed them.

Ellen: Summer time rules –  it’s every girl for herself . . . except when they make me lunch.

Erin: You see the weird inconsistency in that, right?

Ellen: Eh. I guess it all balances out. I’ll save my martyrdom application for something else, like when my teen starts driving.

Erin: Pass that application over now!

-Ellen and Erin

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