Playing with our Food

Ruth begins junior kindergarten this week.

And so begins the next great adventure in family eating: school lunches.
We started today with a 1-hour small-group visit to school, we joined 3 other kids and their accompanying adults to meet the teacher at 1pm- so not until after we ate a picnic of the practice lunch we had packed before going to day-care for the morning.

I don’t know if there will be adults passing judgment on her packed lunch (or, lunches, since they have eating/nutrition/food/lunch breaks in the mid-morning and early afternoon. If there are, I will just have to leave her with polite but firmly worded notes “Ruth is free to pick and choose from the variety of different foods we packed together, eating what she is hungry for and stopping when she is full. This includes the freedom to eat her jellybeans first, in the middle, or last, as she sees fit”. I fear this battle, but I am fully prepared to wage it if necessary.

I also hope they don’t object to a 4 1/2 year old playing with her food. Because we seem to have developed a really specific routine around eating sandwiches (on those occasions when they are not cut into triangles. We like triangles better than squares). She must have learned this from me, because several of these steps (not all of them, interestingly, she has put her own stamp on it) were part of my toast-and-cheese-whiz routine when I was a kid.

Behold, the Devolution of a Sandwich

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