My Welch's Man

Every evening after the kids go to bed, and sometimes while Eric's reading stories, I pack the same lunch for Ryan.  Peanut butter and jelly sandwich, fruit snacks, chips, and a drink.  That sounds so simple.  All-American, easy kid's lunch.  Could be any first grader!

Specifically, he has to have creamy peanut butter and grape jam on honey wheat bread, crusts cut, sandwich cut into triangles, trains, or dinosaurs.  Chips have to be ranch or nacho cheese tortilla chips.  Fruit snacks must be Welch's and absolutely must be the purple pack or red pack.  Drink is wild cherry Capri Sun, but in the past I've subbed Kool-Aid Coolers as long as it was cherry.

*sigh*

What happens if he doesn't get his regular lunch?  I could say he just throws a fit.  But to say it that way communicates that I don't begin to understand my son.  Oh, you wouldn't think so.  You'd think that he was a regular kid, just a rather picky and a bit spoiled.  Some of you may think that anyway, though I doubt you'd be reading at this particular web address if you were that type.

It's not just a fit to get his way.  When something as small as the type of his fruit snacks is different, it might be okay one day.  It might be okay but the larger chance is that it would be as big of a shift as walking outside for work one morning and finding that someone switched your car for a different one.  The same kind, style, year model, but maybe a different color.  Maybe the key even works.

What's wrong?  It's just a car.  Don't throw such a fit.

This is precisely what we're experiencing this week.

Last Wednesday night, we can't remember who did it, myself or my husband.  I think it was me.  Not that it matters, but part of deciding why Ryan has all of a sudden rejected his lunch three days in a row is considering every factor.  And who made his lunch is a factor.  We're trying to pick apart every little thing, because the only lunch I know he will eat has been thrown away uneaten Thursday, Friday, and yesterday.

And it makes me panic a little.

Okay, a lot.

I brought up the subject carefully.  Eric and I both worry when he won't eat.  It's just scary.  So when we started talking about it, we considered everything down to the possibility he could be antsy looking forward to weekend plans.  We thought maybe it was because Eric helped me by making lunch Thursday and Friday.

If you know our house, you know conversations can't last long after school.  Richie and Maelynn discovered that daddy was home and came running, and the lunch dilemma was tabled.  He went to play and I went back to folding laundry.

Then as I was making lunches late in the evening, it hit me.

Friday he threw away his whole sandwich.  But Thursday he peeled it apart and ate only the peanut butter side.  Then I looked at the jam jar.  There was barely any used from it.

Soon as Eric came in from covering plants, I said, "It's the jam."

I bought a different kind of jam.  Dangit.

Considering the time, I finished making the sandwich and put it with a note in his lunchbox.  If he doesn't eat the sandwich today, we know why.

He's a Welch's man.

Thanks be to God for our little Welch's man, and that there is something Ryan will eat.