Snack time

I'm getting lazy. I've stolen the idea for this post from a comment I made on a post of Andrea's yesterday about Tupperware. Sad, isn't it? I was up all night with a barfy Simon, and I have to cram this in before the Bob the Builder DVD is done, so this is as good as it will get today.

Ahem, anyway...

I thought that having a kid in half-day kindergarten would allow me to dodge the bagged lunch woes for at least a couple of years, but I'm finding snack time almost as stressful.

Tristan is in morning junior kindergarten, which goes from 9:00 to 11:30. We're supposed to send a snack and a drink every day. A healthy snack. A healthy snack that Tristan might actually eat. I mean, he's only there for two and a half hours, how much does the kid need to eat in a day?

But fine, I'll send a snack. Tristan's actually a lot better with snacks than actual meals anyway. My real complaint is with the requirement for a drink. I hate tetra pack juice boxes. Hate them! I hate the waste, and the fact that they aren't recyclable. And I still tend to water down the boys' juice, which I can't do with a juice box.

Well, you say, you could send a drink in one of those re-useable drink boxes with the straw, couldn't you? Except I've yet to find one that doesn't leak. At least three times so far this year, I've had to leave Tristan's backpack spread out to air dry overnight after a leak.

On Parent's Night at the end of September, I spoke up and asked if there was a water fountain that the kids could use, instead of wasting all the packaging of juice boxes. Not only the teachers but the parents looked at me like I had three heads. Uh - sure, the teacher said, looking rather bewildered.

And so I buy and send juice boxes. I hate the wasted packaging, I hate the extra sugar and I hate the cost. It figures that the one time I try to take the moral high road, it's the wrong choice. And I've stopped worrying about thinking of goldfish and raisins as a healthy snack, too. At least the bag always comes back empty!