Anyone who rings me on a weekday evening during school term will have heard me mention the words, lunch boxes. I’m about to make the lunch boxes. Or maybe I’ve got to go as I need to make the lunch boxes now. Or the best possible scenario; No, all is good, I can talk for hours now as I’ve just made…. the lunch boxes. I’m sure they are wondering why I’m always banging on about them, I can’t help but wonder myself where I’m going wrong that they’ve become such a giant feature of Sunday to Thursday night. I even checked with the world’s greatest agony-aunt called Google to see if anyone else has this problem, all it gave me is ideas on what to put into them. I’ve an abundance of them, dear Gooog, my problem is that I’ve got lunch box inertia. Seriously, is there no-one else in the world seeking agony-aunting about this!?
I used to make them in the morning before school; that was when I thought I could fit 6 lunch boxes into 10 minutes, including the contemplation and rumination on what day it is, what did they have yesterday, what boomeranged home again, could it even be a warm lunch box day today? That’s an awful lot of thinking at 6.30 am. My me-time with my first coffee suffered terribly back then, there just wasn’t any. As I would slowly but surely get through them, feeling a sense of gettin’ there, the human storm would inevitably come. That’s the big push to get everyone dressed and layered up, fed, groomed, school-bagged and shoved (or gently nudged, depending on who I’m talking to) out the door on time. No different than any other family here probably but adding lunchboxes to that expulsion effort tipped the balance from manageable to madness.
So I got sense and moved the lunch packing routine to the evening. The packed lunch or matpakke is very traditional here in Norway and it’s much more common for people to take a packed lunch to work here than in other countries. The lunch box demands in this house have been building nicely over the last four years. It started off here with just one each for the kids going to barnehage or kindergarten. There was one meal a day provided by the barnehage and one in their lunch box that they brought from home. Then our boy quickly decided that he wasn’t too crazy about hearty food like spinach soup, campfire salmon or crackerbread with pate or mackerel so we had to add a second lunch box for him in the interests of keeping him alive and in good humour every afternoon. I remember one of the teachers in the barnehage saying to me that they didn’t get him young enough; he was four when he moved here and, already used to Great British food, sadly knew something about a world beyond tinned mackerel and felt free to reject it absolutely.
The ante was upped a bit when they started school. There isn’t the concept of a school canteen here, that large designated room where kids gather, queue up and are served ‘school dinners’. Kids get one meal in our school here and it’s more often than not, bread or crackerbread with cheese, kaviar or another spread of some sort. Sometimes it’s hot food like soup, porridge, or fish burger. It’s prepared by the Activity School staff who look after the kids and they eat in the classroom as opposed to gathering in a canteen. It’s good, wholesome food to get them through the day to when they go home and have their main evening meal with their families. Neither of my kids are mad about eating this food every day however, so they always want to have a second lunch box from home. And guess what, once again, I gave in and gave it to them.
Then last September, a 9.30ish frukt pause or fruit break was introduced, enter small lunchbox number three per child. So the two kids now have THREE lunch boxes each going to school. And a water bottle of course. And on the days when I need to bring a packed lunch as well, that’s a grand total of seven lunch boxes. Now, I’m all for keeping kids fed and healthy but I suppose I struggle with the prospect of pressing repeat on this every evening for circa 10 years.
The husband takes the task over sometimes but gets weary at the complexities of it all, who eats and doesn’t eat what and when. I’ve made a rod for my own back, he says as I think ruefully, and with the right amount of defensiveness and reluctance, that he may have a point. We both also know that a lot of food comes home again so there’s too much wastage.
So, after a family meeting about lunch boxes yesterday (if you think I’m kidding, I’m not), we’ve come up with a new plan. I’m cutting back on the second lunchbox where they can eat school food instead. One day at a time. Starting on the days when there is food they could possibly like, like fresh vegetable soup or porridge with raisins. Even plain bread and butter will do fine, they won’t starve. The kids would have agreed to almost anything to wrap up the lunch box meeting so I was feeling smugly pleased with myself afterwards.
I’m already planning what I’m going to do with all of that extra time, maybe take up portrait painting, book reading, who knows. There have been times when I’ve felt a bit like Father Jack¹, sitting in the corner, of an evening, twitching slightly, but instead of growling DRINK or FECK, or worse, I’m growling BOXES, HAVE TO DO THE BOXES. Much as I respect Father Jack, I’ll be happy to let that one go.
¹From Father Ted, Irish sitcom. http://fatherted.wikia.com/wiki/Jack_Hackett
