So I had the pleasure this morning of dragging all three kids to school thirty minutes early to meet with the class moms to plan an upcoming celebration in the classroom. I was already in a great mood, after last night's email exchange with the teacher, during which I asked if my children were welcome to attend since who the hell is babysitting at eight in the morning. After being told they could sit quietly in the hall and read, I promptly asked would she prefer if my three year-old hang from the light fixtures or pry the fire extinguisher off the wall first. He was then, of course, welcomed into the classroom. Again, I was asking, in a much calmer and less public way than I did last year, why do these schools behave as if you have only one child? Regardless, all my offspring were there, safe and accounted for, as I sat through another school meeting.
The focus of this meeting a was the food, as this is a pretty significant holiday celebration. It will be a mutli-course meal that the parents are responsible for supplying, and bringing to the school at 9:00 sharp, so that their children can eat only the bread and dessert. Seeing the variety of items needed, and adding in the fact that all items must be store bought according to New Jersey regulations concerning allergies, the mothers and I decided it might be best if we purchased the items and asked the parents to pay. It's a win-win scenario. No parent has to experience lying in bed, remembering they have to bring forty mini-muffins to school the next day, and rushing out in their pajamas, and we, as the organizers, are not handed three snack-sized bags of blueberry muffins the next morning as a result. So the decision made, I spent an hour at the local grocery pricing out the items at the prepared foods counter and bakery - you all know how I feel about supermarket bakery cake. I thought using their food services, rather than, say a catering company, would keep costs down.
Then I get an email. From a mother who came into the meeting five minutes before it ended. She wants to buy all the stuff at the local organic supermarket to avoid high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils and trans fats, and to have as much of the produce be as organic as possible. Sigh. This is just what we need to drive the costs up, of food the kids won't even eat, so the parents can bitch when we ask them to throw us a few bucks, allowing us to do them the favor of planning a hassle-free party for their kids. Those snack bags of muffins were starting to look pretty good.
Now, don't get me wrong. I buy mostly organic produce, and gave the kids only organic milk for quite a while - or until our milk bill was almost as much as our cable bill. I buy Pirate Booty and Annie's macaroni and cheese and Horizon organic chocolate milk boxes. I have drunk the organic-no-trans-fats-or-high-fructose-corn-syrup Kool-Aid. Just not a gallon of it.
I understand there are parents who are extremely dedicated to their children's nutritional habits, and I admire you greatly. If you made you kids' baby food, you are my hero. I also understand that good nutrition is one of the cornerstones to a healthy life, and those habits need to be formed in childhood. What I do not understand, in this particular instance, is the fear that one meal not entirely made of organic ingredients, or dare I say it, loaded with preservatives, is going to give your kid cancer down the road or prevent him from going to Harvard. A bag of Doritos once in a while is not such a bad thing, is it?
Look at our parents generation. Raised on "space aged" foods. The more multi-syllabic words on that label, the better it is. It's made by SCIENCE, Son! TV dinners, Campbell's soup, Twinkies, Jello, it's a miracle they didn't grow two heads. And aren't there, like, a billion baby boomers that are going to suck the life out of Social Security before we can get to it? My own grandmother, who, granted, may have been naturally preserved by years of hard living, is almost one hundred.
So take it easy on yourselves once in a while nutritional Superheroes. You efforts will most likely ensure your kid has higher SAT scores than mine. Just cut yourself some slack and don't make yourself, or the rest of us who are not as tireless and dedicated as you are, crazy two or three times a year. Besides, nothing makes you see how much better eating well makes you feel than making yourself sick on Sno Balls* at the holiday party.
*OK, even I, who love all processed sweets, wouldn't eat these things, since I can feel the preservatives coursing through my veins after the first bite.
