What’s for lunch?
Every day, at about one in the afternoon, give or take half an hour, I ask one of my most dreaded questions of the day – “What do you want for lunch?” Part of the trepidation stems from the responses. They occasionally ask for kooky things or sometimes it’s because I just don’t want to make lunch that day. Whatever the reason, I do not look forward to the lunch question.
Breakfast is such a simple meal. There’s a fairly well-defined group of foods that are associated with breakfast – oatmeal, eggs, yogurt, smoothies, cold cereal, bagels, the list goes on and on. Dinner isn’t terribly awful either. I plan my meals out on a weekly basis, so I’ve already answered that question at the beginning of the week. Lunch though is this weird, nebulous meal between breakfast and lunch without a well-defined group of foods associated with it. Is cold cereal still legal? Should I be making a hot meal every day? The vague nature of lunch makes it hard to nail down just what we should be having every day.
Nathan, Emily, and Joshua have also been stuck in a rut of late. All they want for lunch is peanut butter and jelly. Sometimes we’ll mix it up and have peanut butter and honey, but it always comes back to peanut butter and something. Always. And while PB&J is easy, inexpensive, and not the worst thing on the planet nutritionally (because let’s be honest, if it was so horrible, most of us would have died somewhere in our elementary years), it is so boring! I get tired of making the same thing every day, and I’m surprised they’re not getting tired of eating the same thing every day yet. I would have given up eating by now if that’s all there was!
And so I inwardly cringe as I ask once again, what’s for lunch that day. Because if I make many more peanut butter and whatever sandwiches, I might go crazy.
What is your least favorite question of the day?
