And maybe it wasn’t a big stretch, because despite the fact that my mom is a wonderful cook and did cook a healthy homemade dinner every single night for us, our lunches did tend to come from cans and boxes - I ate a lot of Chef Boyardee and Campbell’s soups as a kid. And I couldn’t wait to tell my mom all about it and get her to make it for me. We weren’t really a macaroni and cheese kind of household, which is probably why I liked it so much (because, let’s face it, it doesn’t taste that great).
![reddit mac and cheese pillow reddit mac and cheese pillow](https://i.redd.it/d7gpya12sjx51.jpg)
I’d slept over at a friend’s house, and before bringing me home the next day, her mother made us lunch from that infamous blue box. How clearly I remember the day I first convinced my mother to start buying boxed macaroni and cheese. But a week from now, a month from now, a year from now, how attuned will he be to what his friends are eating - and more importantly, what they’re NOT? Sure, today he’s happy to bring his lunch: a pancake sandwich (made with sunflower butter on two pumpkin-oatmeal pancakes), corn and carrots, orange slices, and a blueberry applesauce. Yes, sometimes it means more work for me than I really want to do but it also usually means a happy child and an empty lunchbox, so as far as I’m concerned, everybody wins.īut I’m wondering now how long this can last. He hasn’t mentioned it in a very long time, possibly because (at least in part) I involve him in deciding what he wants me to pack for him. eat the snack provided by their school, he doesn’t stand out entirely from the crowd, but I know that on Fridays, at least - which are still Pizza Days as far as I know - he’s set apart by his packed lunches. L.’s already different from his classmates at lunch time I’m not sure how conspicuously, but he is definitely different. That the healthy, homemade snacks go the way of the dodo when they discover that their grade-schoolers are tossing the whole-wheat banana muffin in the trash and bumming Fruit Gushers off their friends. People tell me that their hummus-loving kindergartners suddenly refuse to bring anything “weird” for lunch, because their classmates make fun of them or refuse to sit with them when their lunches look different from the norm. I’ve heard other food-conscious parents speak with barely concealed anxiety about these days - the days when their little omnivores suddenly begin to long for conformity, not just on the nap mats, but at the lunch tables. He’s starting to want to be just like everybody else. I was relieved to have had an easy solution, and I thought the whole thing was cute, but as I got ready for work this morning, a thought stopped me in my tracks: He proudly marched out the door with it this morning and put it in his cubby at school, happy to be just like his friends. He laid on the couch with it before dinner, after bath, and took it to bed with him.
![reddit mac and cheese pillow reddit mac and cheese pillow](https://randomamandahome.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/img_2966.jpg)
proclaimed enthusiastically more than once that he LOOOOVED his “Pillow Pet” SOOOOO much. which he loved for all of 2 months, then promptly forgot about - would become my salvation in the first moment of Gotta-Have-Its we’ve experienced. Little did I know that the blue elephant I bought for L. My thought at the time was that they were not only cute, but might serve a practical purpose on long car trips to visit family.
REDDIT MAC AND CHEESE PILLOW FULL
and I met him in his classroom at pick-up time, the very first thing out of his mouth (besides “Mommyyyyyyy!!!!!”) was: “I want a Pillow Pet!”įortunately, the Gods of Preschool Trendiness were smiling upon me, because last Christmas - yes, a full YEAR ago - I had seen some distant cousin of the Pillow Pet, the Zoobie Pet, in a catalog and bought one for each of my boys. There are days, frankly, when I would like a Pillow Pet myself, to take the edge off those mid-afternoon slumps at work. I get it - they’re cute, they’re cuddly, and if you have to spend an hour or more laying on a cot in the middle of the day, a Pillow Pet seems to be THE cool accessory with which to do it. I’ve noticed the proliferation of the puffy beasts in the cubbies of L.’s Pre-K classmates for some time now, but what started as a couple of fuzzy, overstuffed buddies spilling out of their confines has now (post-holidays) exploded into a frenzy of brightly colored pillowy friends oozing out in every direction. Although I’m certainly no stranger to the idea of peer pressure and influence among young children - when you have to live the reality of having your kids in day care and preschool basically from infancy, you understand these things at a very early age - yesterday was the very first time that I really experienced my child buying into the trends in full force.