I had heard about lunches like this, but it had been years since I had actually seen one. The last time was during a visit at grandma's where I had tried to reign in a fountain of temptations run a muck with reasonable success. This time, I tried to figure out how much control I had and act on it accordingly.
Our new neighbor didn't realize that there was a half-day of school today so mom was at work when her first-grade daughter stepped off the bus. My kids and I took her home with us and I proceeded to make lunch. Because the girl's father thought she'd be in school the whole day, he had packed a lunch for her, which I decided would be easier to give her, than to try and make a third lunch. Yeah...
When I opened her lunch bag, I was shocked to find one of those lunches I had only read about; a bag of Cheetos, three snack-sized candy bars, a fruit roll-up, a sandwich, and a can of pop. Stunned, I shoved the candy bars back in the bag and gave her the rest of her lunch to which, she proceeded to tell me that she wasn't too hungry as she popped a Cheetos in her mouth. Then, she finished them off, asked how much she needed to eat of her sandwich (because she wasn't really hungry) then ate everything else. In the end, she knew there was something missing and found her missing candy bars in her bag.
Seriously? I couldn't get her to even finish one half of her sandwich. And because her lunch was packed by her own parent, I didn't have the authority to interfere. But I wanted to. Boy, did I want to.
