Packing a “lunch” for pre-K
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- September
- 13
Sorry I’ve been so lax in blogging lately, but it’s been a pretty busy time in my house.A week and a half ago, my oldest, Rafael, started attending pre-kindergarten.
We’re very fortunate in that our school district in New Jersey has universal pre-K. He could have started when he was 3, but we decided to wait until this year, after he turned 4.
My husband is a stay-at-home dad, so it didn’t seem to make sense to put him in a full-day program, five days a week just yet. Especially when it meant that our schedules for vacations and the like would become locked into a strict pattern once he started school.
But I digress.
The district provides free breakfast and a very inexpensive lunch. But Rafael, as I believe I’ve mentioned in the past, can be rather picky at times. So he eats his breakfast of “Uncle Andy’s Cereal” (known to the world at large as Honey Bunches of Oats) — “in a bowl like you used to have, Mommy, with a long silver spoon and no raisins, just milk” — and for the first couple of days we packed two or three packages of those cheese cracker sandwiches with peanut butter, a couple of juice boxes and a plastic container with Goldfish crackers.
In, of course, his old-style metal Spider-Man lunchbox.After the first two days, Ms. Frank sent home a note in his lunchbox, asking if Rafael was going to be bringing lunch each day. We’d asked the teacher’s assistant a couple of times about the lunch situation, but things were a bit crazy the first couple of days of school and it was all a bit disorganized and up in the air.
The school just opened this year and the district just eliminated middle schools moving to a pre-K through eighth-grade system, so a bit of chaos, I suppose, was to be expected.
My husband talked to Ms. Frank the next day when he picked up Rafael. We’d send along some snacks each day with Rafael, he explained, but we wanted to buy the school lunch.
And if all the children in the class are eating the same thing, there’s probably a greater chance he’ll actually eat his lunch.
If he’ll sit still for the meal, but that’s another story for another day.
Soon enough, he was bringing home more food than he’d gone to school with. That day, he had three juices in his lunchbox instead of two.
Another day, a snack pack of pretzels. One other, a snack bag of Goldfish crackers.This past week, Rafael stopped wanting to bring his lunchbox and started wanting to bring his Marvel superheroes backpack that he’s been wearing almost all day long every day all sumer.
That was fine with me. He still managed to bring home some snacks and a tiny carton of orange juice.
I have a feeling that packing lunches is going to be very easy, at least for this year.
And we should have plenty of little snacks and drinks for our excursions on the weekends.
Image via Stock.xchng. And, as much as I love crunchy Cheetos, my little ones only get to indulge if we’re at a party.
This entry was posted
on Saturday, September 13th, 2008 at 1:10 pm by Amy Vernon.
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I’m sorry I don’t get it. Why would your son be bringing home food he did not go to school with? I also do not get why this article is under “kid nutrition”. Honestly, the breakfast and snacks you were sending him to school with sound unhealthy.
I am trying to understand this so please enlighten me.
Hi Justyn –
I think you misunderstood some of what I wrote. Our school provides breakfast and lunch and snacks. He ate a bowl of cereal at home before going to school. We didn’t send him to school with breakfast.
He came home with food he didn’t go to school with because, as I’ve often written about in this blog, my son can be quite picky. And when he’s excited, he tends to be too excited to eat.
Besides breakfast and lunch, they get little snacks at school, and little juices and the like, and he ends up bringing them home instead of eating them there. Because that’s just how he is.