Lunch Lady

I get slowly better at doing this life. Some things are obvious, I know, but I am just now getting wise to them.

That last sentence should be engraved on my tombstone.

One small victory in my domestic sphere is that I'm finally making the kids' lunches at night and not in the morning before school. I know. I know! For the five previous years of Laura's elementary school career, she has bought lunch at school, despite the fact that the food there is not that good. Somehow I thought that she preferred it that way, and that it was more convenient. Turns out, she would rather bring her lunch from home because that way, she can choose her seat as soon as her class enters the lunchroom. When she buys lunch there, she has to go through the line and then accept the vagaries of lunch table seating fate, or, even worse, sit at the dreaded "overflow table," from whose bourn no traveler returns.

Laura, self-portrait.

So now we're packing her lunch at night and she is free to place herself precisely in the coterie of her choosing.

She gets: cheese quesadilla, boiled egg, fruit, yogurt, juice box, and a crunchy (crackers or the popcorn Matt makes nightly).

Hank gets: peanut butter and jelly sandwich, fruit, yogurt, juice box, and crunchy.

I don't do pretty bento lunches, and I over-rely on baggies. But again, progress is slow for me in some areas.

Related: my beagle can count to four. Whenever I start to make Hank a sandwich (a zillion times a day), she smells the peanut butter or something and stations herself at my feet. She knows that I will cut the crusts off and feed them to her. I make a cut to each side of the sandwich, and she eats them one, two, three, four and then turns and walks away. Genius counting dog!

I'm telling you about this lunch thing because when it is late and I am tired, I think, "I still need to make lunches." And here lately in April, I think, "I still have to make lunches. And blog." So I am using the one to furnish forth a post for the other.

....

I will not lie, I had a pretty awesome day today.

Even though it started off with a fretful and feverish Hank. I assessed him this morning and decided that he needed his ear checked by the doc. They could see us at 9:50, which gave me time to go through the drop-off line at Hank's school and drop off not him, but the day's snack for his class. I am the snack mom this week, and I couldn't let the kids go without their individual cups of applesauce. Then I drove through the rain towards the doctor's office, thinking about how hard we are all trying. Just trying hard to get things right and do things well, all of us, you and you and me. And I thought, "I should just say to myself, 'You are trying hard, to do right and do your best. Good work.'"

Then we got to the doctor and they were able to see Hank quickly, and all was well. I got him medicated and got him set up comfortably at home. And I know it sounds weird, but I treasured the ordinariness and remediability of that ear infection. Little problems with ready solutions.

After lunch, thinking the rain would cancel all tennis-related activities for the day, I did the shred workout with Pretty Neighbor. Then my foster children came over to play. Then, later in the afternoon, PN and I fed our kids together at my house and then went to a meeting for rising sixth-graders at the middle school.

Middle school!

This school is just like Lake Wobegon; all the kids there are above average.

While I was at the meeting, my tennis buddy T called me and said the courts were dry and that we were on at 7:30, our first match in the T2 season. (T2 is a so-called flex league, where you just grab a partner, get matched with opponents, and schedule your own matches.)

I went home, greeted the kids, changed clothes, and went up to the courts. I was nervous because we're new to this league. And y'all, we had such a great match! T and I won in three sets, it was really close: 6-2, 4-6, 6-4. We knew the girls we were playing against, and I remembered them as much better players than us.

But we've gotten better! And, as Matt says, they stayed the same.

At one point, the score was 15-all and the girl hit a lob to the corner on my backhand side. I was running to it, watching the little yellow ball, seeing nothing else, when all the lights on the court went out. We were plunged into black darkness. For a second I thought that I had gone blind, because I couldn't understand why I could no longer see that yellow ball.

Then we moved to the other court and replayed the point and then there was winning! So much more fun to win in a competitive match than to crush or be crushed.

I know, one of those tennis blogs.

We played for over two hours, yet when I came home the kids were still awake. I set that right and visited with Matt. Then I made lunches. And here we are.

Goodness I do go on! Thanks for reading me. I hope you found some pleasure in your day. xoxo