The Lunch Struggle

I loathe the days F eats lunch at school. He faithfully hauls the lunchbox he picked out, opens it, and then pokes at one of the three items I lovingly packed and puts it all back. A nearly entirely intact lunch returns to me at the end of the day. Plus, one grouchy, grumpy, tired kiddo who has low blood sugar and is taking it out on me.
During the winter break I decided to attack the lunch struggle with all available forces. I checked out lunch cookbooks, I read online articles about cute food, I purchased cute pokey things to stick into/onto food.

So cute! Wouldn't your lunch taste better with cool stick things stuck in it? Or these snazzy lunch box notes complete with stickers?

Before school started back up T and I sat down with kiddo and had a talk that went kind of like this,

"But I do eat my lunch!"

"Well, no, you don't. You bring it all home." 

"Sorry, I forgot."

ARGH! The I Forgot. No more cursed words could ever be found in a 5 year old's vocabulary. Yes, you can remember the name and number of every single ski lift on the mountain and exactly what color socks we all put on 17 days ago, but you forgot to eat your lunch.

I bought a cookbook and F and I went page by page and stuck flags on all the items he deemed good enough to eat. Now, this child is not a picky eater. He just has better things to do on his lunch hour than eat. I soldiered forth, stuck my fancy sticks, cut cool shapes out of bread with my cookie cutters, and I thought FOR SURE he would eat lunch. Nope.

Next conversation went like this,

"You may NOT go to all day kindergarten if you don't EAT YOUR LUNCH. You have one more day to show us that you can eat lunch before I cancel all day kindergarten FOREVER!!!! MWAH HA HA!" Ok, so maybe not quite so dramatic but you get the drift. F finally did, too.

Next day, the only thing left in his lunch was the stick I stuck in his wrap :)