Dear Noah....you can be so polite.......and what will we do for school lunches this year?

I was doing my exercises today and you had to come out and ask me something....so you said "Mommy I hate to disturb you while you are doing your exercises but...."

You blow me away sometimes with how grown up and polite you can be.

I am already thinking about school lunches for you this year. Last year you ate leftover Domino's pizza EVERY DAY of the school year. EVERY DAY! I know you are limited in what you eat....and this sometimes goes in phases.....but I cannot imagine you being able to do that every day again of this coming school year. We tried to treat your school lunch as more of a midmorning "snack" as you really ate a meal AFTER school.....(a SUNCH as you call it.....half an early supper and half a late lunch). Then you do not have another meal. So you mainly eat breakfast.....have a snack......do the sunch....and then MAYBE sometimes another snack.

BUT...when you do the "snack" lunch at school and then eventually tire of the pizza and stop eating it pretty much altogether and only eat your cookies and milk for dessert....you sometimes (I think) just don't have sufficient energy reserves from a good food source in your system to properly handle a school day.

You have made your rounds with food. As a baby you did actually eat baby food fruits and veggies but no meat. That would make you vomit. As you got older the textures of the veggies or fruit gagged you..or the smell did.....so you refused them and you gravitated to the meat and bread. You ate toast with butter....but ONLY a specific type of margarine.....Blue Bonnet.....anything else you could smell and taste the difference and then you would NOT eat it. The bread also had to be a specific type of bread....(Orowheat buttermilk white bread I think it was) NO substitutes or you would NOT eat it and you would have a meltdown if someone tried to make you eat it. You would eat my bacon...then that stopped and you switched to precooked Oscar Mayer bacon strips.....you used to eat Pillsbury frozen pancakes but never my homemade pancakes. You WILL eat pancakes at restaurants.

You used to eat pork chops....now do not. You tell me maybe you will again when you are 30. You used to eat beef on pizza sometimes but now no. I for one do not encourage beef or pork so I don't care if you ever eat those again. You tell me maybe you will try a hamburger when you are 39. Ketchup at 25. You have specific ages for trying things in your life.

You used to eat ONLY BANQUET frozen chicken nuggets....NOTHING else. NOW you will NOT eat anything like that....only fast food chicken nuggets. RECENTLY I did finally get you to try my GRILLED chicken breast which you actually LOVED..so now we have that as a choice.

You will eat macaroni and cheese but it has to be ONLY KRAFT macaroni and cheese..cooked just right...not too soft and not too uncooked....and NO SPLIT NOODLES. IF anything is even remotely off...you will not eat it. (I remember going through the boxes before dumping the pasta into the boiling water...sifting through the noodles to make sure there were no split ones...and if there were....pulling them out and tossing them into the trash.)

Same for frozen French fries....they can ONLY be Ore-Ida and they can only be baked for so long. Too brown and you will not eat them. Too under-baked and you will not eat them. Finding your required state of perfection in foods for eating is sometimes hard to accomplish.

You used to eat my spaghetti but now will ONLY eat the sauce. NO pasta....but you will eat Garlic Toast (specific kind only) and dip it in the sauce. YOU WILL eat at Fazoli's however and the spaghetti there. Also the ziti.

You do not eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or bologna or any lunch meats or things like that. You will only eat Ruffles potato chips and not very often. I cannot send the spaghetti sauce and garlic toast to school and have you eat it hot and fresh like you have to have it. Same for the mac and cheese..which has to be cooked just so and I have to add extra cheese to it. So that leaves what options?

Leftover cold pizza. AND it took me a long time to get you to be able to eat COLD pizza which is the only way we can send the pizza to school and they do not apparently let any of you kids warm anything up in a microwave.

I have already sent an e-mail to the principal asking about this and if I could perhaps pick you up for lunch a couple of times per week or some type of alternative from time to time so you won't get burned out on the repetitive lunch. Although the repetition of meals never seems to bother you. You can have Ore-Ida hash browns every day for breakfast and never tire of them. Same for pizza......

We will work it out....so no worries. What used to seem like such a hard thing to do in regards to feeding you has actually become pretty easy. You actually require very little...and never seem to mind repetition of meals. You are easy to please as long as what I give you is one of the foods you can eat!

I love you Noah.....very much!

Mommy
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