Saturday, January 26, 2013

The best fed kid in school

I often tell people that I learn something new every day. With a twelve year old boy in my house, I can almost say I learn something new every hour.

I don’t know what happens to a person’s brain when they hit this magical age. I’m not sure if it is awash in hormone activity or they just get distracted with life in general, but whatever it is, in my son’s case, he seems to have lost the ability to think rationally.

His interest in girls has turned me into an undercover agent for Spy Moms, Inc. I don’t feel good about this, but I’m also not going to sit on the sidelines and idly watch while he attempts to make adult decisions with his kid brain.

Basketball was the best thing ever. Practice was after school and so intense, he was too tired to do much at all besides come home and lie on the couch exhausted. Girl problem solved.

Then the grades started to slip. Why wasn’t he doing his homework? Was basketball too much for him?

With all this going on, the last thing I thought I had to worry about was this kid eating lunch at school.

Last week, the coach pulled my husband aside and said he needed to know what our son was doing at lunch. What could he possibly be doing? Begging food from the other kids!

Yes, you read that correctly. Our son, this overgrown beast of a boy, had been bumming food from the other kids at lunch.

It had gotten so bad that another child’s mother sent in an extra lunch for our son and told her child to let the cafeteria people know to send a reduced fare form home for us to fill out so our boy could at least have nourishment every day.

To say we were livid is an understatement. All he had to do was let me know he needed lunch money and I would’ve given him the funds, but there was more to this story.

Rewind to October when he was slacking on his household chores and I said, “Listen here, if you aren’t going to do your chores, then I’m not paying for your school lunch anymore. So start packing your lunch from now on! Got it?”

When I asked last week why he didn’t just tell me he needed lunch money, he replied, “You said you weren’t going to pay for lunch anymore.”  Bingo! There it was: Mom is evil.

Why didn’t he pack his lunch like I told him which I had, by the way, totally forgotten about?

“Well, I take an apple, but a sandwich gets all smooshed in my backpack and I don’t want to carry a lunch box.”

“So you’d rather beg for food? Are you kidding me? Do you realize that the other kids probably tried to hide their food when they saw you coming in the cafeteria?” I shouted this and a lot of other things because I was irate and irrational.

I sent the generous mother who donated the lunch a message on Facebook thanking her and telling her the real story behind my son’s nonsense.

The good news is that there is now plenty of money in his lunch account. I think he’s set until February. The bad news is that I don’t think his brain functioning will improve any time soon. Lucky for him, his dad and I are here to keep him in line.

No comments:

Post a Comment