“Mommy, I wish I could have a Happy Meal for lunch EVERY DAY!” exclaimed my 6-year-old while frantically waving around the new “Rio” toy she plucked from her McDonald’s bag. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“It would be nice,” I replied thinking about how it would spare me from getting up even earlier than I already do each day to pack a school lunch that barely gets looked at, let alone consumed.
“You told me that you aren’t hungry in school,” I pressed.
“Well, I would eat all of my lunch if it had a toy in it,” she countered.
Well, of course she would.
Believe it or not, earlier in the school year I toyed with the idea of placing a little trinket inside my daughter’s lunch bag to go along with the fresh strawberries, Wheat Thins and cheese sticks that she requests every.single.day. I figured I could load up on small plastic doodads from the Dollar Store and pack them in one or two lunches each the week.
Unfortunately, my daughter’s school has a strict no-toy policy, so that put the kibosh on that idea.
Instead, for the first three months of the school year I slipped little notes into my daughter’s lunch bag. They were just simple Post-Its filled with I love yous, xoxoxoxoxoxoxos, and the occasional directive: “Don’t dump the berries. Just bring them home.”
Some days I would doodle hearts, stars, or flowers around the edges of the paper. Other days I would draw stick figures fighting over the food I packed in an effort to cajole my kid to eat at least half of what I packed. After all, I reasoned, if she saw stick figures battling for the last berry that would surely entice her to beat them to the punch, right?
Sadly, since the end of Christmas break, I haven’t been very good at keeping up the lunch note tradition. In my perpetual battle against time I’ve been failing to remember to tuck those magical little messages in between the plastic fork and the bag of Wheat Thins. These days I have to write a note to remind myself to write notes for the lunch bag.
Even sadder is the fact that I know how much my daughter looks forward to reading them. Last month during an open house event at her school she took me over to her desk to show me her “secret compartment”–a.k.a. a leftover business size envelope she slides into a narrow opening between the desk’s shelves. Inside the envelope she unveiled a neat stack of Post-Its.
My daughter kept all of the notes I packed inside her lunch bag.
“I look at them every day,” she said with a smile.
Sniff.
Who says a meal has to include a toy in order for it to make someone happy?
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