Tag: teen appetites

Life Lessons List

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This post is in response to the Writing 101, Day 2 prompt to write a list. I currently have three teenagers, but I have spent my entire adult life working with teenagers. Hence, my list:

Things I’ve learned from teenagers…

  1. Don’t get bogged down in the present. Just keep pushing on.
  2. Have fun. Laughter and fun are important to fostering a healthy outlook.
  3. It’s okay to be silly sometimes.
  4. It’s okay to be sad sometimes.
  5. Always have food on hand. Good food will bring friends. And you never know when you might be hungry.
  6. Other people will have their opinions. You don’t have to agree with them.
  7. When your “friends” don’t treat you right, move on. It’s better to have a handful of good friends than a crowd of superficial ones.
  8. Being nice is an important skill in getting through life. You may want to say something mean, but sometimes it’s best not to.
  9. Look forward to the future. It is full of promise
  10. Young people have good ideas. Sometimes, they have great ideas. Listen to them. They are the future.

   10½. Did I mention food? It’s always about the food.

Oddities #3

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On Tuesday, I took my children to the airport and put them on a plane to travel to their father’s house for their annual two-week summer visitation. Their flight was scheduled for the middle of the day. Lunch time, to be exact. But for C, who has cashed in his school schedule for the teen sleep-plan, breakfast is often the midday meal. When he got up that morning, he didn’t want to eat.

“I’m not going to buy you a meal at the airport,” I told him in my sternest no nonsense tone. “I don’t have money to pay airport prices. Find something to eat.”

“There’s nothing to eat,” he complained. “I’ve already looked. I’ll just eat when I get there,” he stated. As if that was an option.

“You tell me how hungry you are every time you go to your father’s. You say he doesn’t feed you. You say there’s never any food in the house. And now you say the first thing you’re going to do when you get there is eat lunch?” He stared at me with the blank expression that said he didn’t want to engage—with me or the world. “Eat something, please. We’re going to be late.”

He grabbed a box of cereal and a sandwich bag. “I’ll just take a bag of these,” he said, holding up the box. Fine, I thought. At least it’s better than nothing. He filled the bag, and we were on our way.

He ate a few bits of cereal on the way to the airport. When I stopped fast to avoid the car in front of me, the bag of cereal slid off C’s lap, and the cereal scattered across the floor on the passenger side. He didn’t even try to save it.

“Are you kidding?” I asked.

“What?” he replied, as if he had absolutely no control over the situation. He sat there, looking at me. I raised my eyebrows. “What?” he repeated.

“Seriously? Are you going to pick it up?”

He looked down at the cereal at his feet and sighed. He bent down and pushed it into a pile. “Throw it out the door when you get out,” I instructed. Because clearly, that wasn’t obvious. Some days, I feel like a walking, talking instruction manual.

It started to rain. Hard. I turned the windshield wipers on high and wished they’d go higher. They beat their rhythm as we drove. “Do you want me to drop you off and then park?” I asked over the roar of the rain, the drumming of the wipers.

“Sure,” came three voices in unison. I pulled up in front of the doors by the ticket counters. The kids got out, grabbed their bags from the trunk and stepped onto the sidewalk.

I drove around, pulled into short-term parking, and parked the car. Just as I was turning off the engine, I looked down at the floor of the passenger side. Cereal. It looked like the work of squirrels.

I am sure C would blame it on the rain.

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Baking

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I was making fresh strawberry scones the other morning.

I dumped a small pile of flour on a piece of waxed paper so I could flatten the dough and cut it into scone-sized triangles.

“Is that your bench flour?” C asked.

“My bench flour?” I looked at him, unsure of his reference. “You mean this pile here? Is that what you call it?”

“Yeah. And you save it when you’re done.” I spread the flour with my hand and plopped the dough onto the flour where it (hopefully) wouldn’t stick. I rolled it into a ball, worked it for a minute, then started to spread it out.

“You save it?” I asked, a bit incredulous, knowing what my ‘bench flour’ looks like when I’m done. In fact, as the dough stuck to my hands, I would rub little bits of dough off my fingers and into the ‘bench flour.’

“Why wouldn’t you save it?” C asked. “It’s just flour and little pieces of pie crust.”

“Well, not really….” I thought for a minute. “What if you are making chocolate scones? Then your ‘bench flour’ has little bits of chocolate dough in it. When you roll out your pie crust, it gets chocolate in it.”

“That’s half the fun,” C replied, mischief creeping into his tone. “It’s like a treasure hunt. ‘What will I find in my bench flour today? Oh look! A whole blueberry!!’”

“That’s gross,” I stated, but I laughed in response. “I think I’ll throw out my bench flour. Thanks.” Funny or not, there will be no “treasure” traveling between my baked goods.

But from here on, every time I eat something from a bakery, I will wish there were some things I did not know.

Settings

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One of my least favorite chores is buying groceries. I don’t really know why it’s my least favorite, other than it takes time out of my schedule; I have to physically touch every object I buy multiple times (way too many, in my book); and it’s EXPENSIVE (and getting even more so by the second). Nowadays, I tend to get groceries on my way home from work, which delays my arrival home AND our family dinner.

When my children were younger, we all went to the grocery store together much more often than we do now. Occasionally, when I had only a few items and I was feeling particularly adventurous, we would use the “self-scan” registers. One time, when C was about 10 or 11, he ran ahead of me into the self-scan lane, and hit the button on the screen indicating that we wanted our checkout experience to be in Spanish. Um… what?

First of all, it is important to understand that throughout junior high, high school and college, I took French. Back then, we didn’t have exposure to foreign languages before we hit 7th grade, and at that point, we had to choose our career language—the language we would take through high school. Nobody ever switched. Thus, I know English and French (and a little bit of Greek from a two-month exchange trip back in the dark ages). No Spanish. None.

I stared at the screen with no idea what to do. How do you fix the language setting when you can’t understand the language in which the machine is prompting you? Ugh! Out of frustration, I moved to another register and let that one time out and reset itself. And I made a mental note not to let C beat me to the self-scan registers anymore.

Yesterday, a new laptop arrived in the mail for C. He was in the living room running through the set up procedures, and I could hear him reading the options aloud. “Set language….” And BAM! Just like that, I was transported back to that day in the supermarket. I could see the sly smile he gave me that day, just like it happened yesterday.

“Set it to Spanish, C!” I called to the living room. “Just like you used to do to me in the grocery store!”

He snickered. “Yeah. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

Yes, I thought, my own sly smile brightening my face. It would be kinda fun, wouldn’t it?

Nothing Good

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One day this week, my daughter came downstairs for breakfast. She opened the fridge and looked inside. She stood there just a moment too long, surveying. She sighed, “There’s nothing good in here.” No, there is never anything good to eat in my house.

This is one thing I dread about school letting out for the summer. My children will check the refrigerator, the cabinet, wherever, sigh and declare, “There’s nothing good to eat.” In an hour or so, they will come back to stare into the fridge and repeat the process. They don’t seem to notice that I have not left the house and no one has entered. “There’s nothing good to eat,” is a complaint I hear daily.

Last night, I made a batch of blueberry muffins—a dozen muffins in all. I got up this morning to make lunches and get the kids out the door. By the time I sat down for breakfast, the muffins were gone.

Monday afternoon, I came home from an errand to find C, who had just arrived from school, sitting at the kitchen table downing a rather large bowl of pasta salad. Actually, it was the “Family Sized” bowl, and I know this because we were going to have it for dinner.

“What are you doing?” I asked, trying to temper my accusatory tone into curiosity. I didn’t want him to think that I was accusing him of doing something wrong when he had made a relatively healthy snack choice.

“Mom!” he nearly yelled, immediately defensive that I should walk in and catch him eating, of all things. “I eat four meals a day! My school lunch is at 10:30. You can’t even call that lunch.”

“So this is one of your meals?” I questioned.

“Yeah. This is my lunch!” Well, it’s good to know my pasta salad wasn’t merely a snack, I suppose.

And during the warmer weather—like now—I try to keep some cut up fruit in the fridge. I cut up an average of two whole watermelons a week. I cut it into bite-sized pieces and put it in a bowl, so it will be cold and delicious and ready to eat. Every time I think I might snack on some watermelon, I go into the fridge and it’s not there. The empty bowl sits in the sink with only a bit of pink juice remaining in the bottom. One of the teens in the house has consumed the contents of said bowl, though he or she blames another. “I only ate some of it. C ate the rest!” or “J ate the last piece….”

Come to think of it, I’m beginning to understand why my kids say, “There is nothing good to eat!” I can’t find anything, either….

Dinner harmony

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It was Friday morning, and we had just returned from a short vacation the previous evening. We had little food in the house—other than crackers and chips—so I was going to have to go shopping, both for food and for inspiration.

“What do you want for dinner?” I asked J as we scrambled up some eggs for lunch. The question always presents a challenge—both for me and for the ones answering—but this time, I had no ideas and needed direction.

She thought for only a brief moment before she said, “Popovers!”

Popovers have become a favorite food item in our house, though when the kids were younger, they used to eat the egg-y middles, leaving the crispy outsides. As they grew and their tastes matured, they began to devour fresh-from-the-oven popovers in their entirety. With my work schedule, however, I tend to make them as a weekend or vacation treat. But on this day, I had time and it was still chilly outside, so popovers seemed like a good choice.

“And make a lot so we won’t fight over them,” she added, thinking ahead to the need to accommodate her teenaged appetite.

“Hmm. What do you want to have with them?” I questioned. Because I consider popovers to be cold weather food, we often pair them with soup or stew, but the beginning of May is no longer soup and stew season.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Whatever.” And once again, I was on my own to think about what else to serve.

Later, when C finally got out of bed and came downstairs, I asked him the same question. (I didn’t ask W since he is still outgrowing his childhood pickiness and would be happy to eat pasta three meals a day, seven days a week. Then again, pasta is always a good choice…).

“Popovers!” came C’s immediate reply. “But make sure you make enough.”

Agreement! Because my children had been fighting all week, I had to give them credit for actually agreeing on something. Not that the choice of dinner is earth shattering, but I suppose it’s a start. And they both specified that I would have to make more than usual, so the “shortage” wouldn’t incite an unnecessary argument.

Clearly, we would have popovers for dinner. Some days, I’ll take whatever I can get.

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Temptation

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“I think I’m going to have a few peanut butter eggs,” C announced as he finished his dinner and pushed his chair away from the table. I had picked up a bag of chocolate covered peanut butter eggs from the clearance bin on a quick trip through the grocery store in the days after Easter. It was a temptation my sugar-addict couldn’t resist.

“A few peanut butter eggs,” I repeated. “Exactly how many is ‘a few’?” He smiled in response, but made no reference to an exact number. Earlier, when I arrived home from work, I had noticed several wrappers from this very same treat in the trash. So I asked, “Didn’t you already have some when you got home from school?”

He raised one eyebrow, a talent he learned at a young age from his grandmother. “M-a-y-be…” he drew out the word, so as to throw in some uncertainty. It wasn’t working because… well, I had seen the wrappers in the trash.

“I think you’ve had enough,” I told him. I used to say, I think you’ve had enough sugar for one day, but that was when he was waist high and zipped around the house like a bouncy ball if he even so much as smelled sugar.

He feigned a look of shock. “Enough? There is never enough.” He shook his head as he made his way to the pantry cabinet. He reached in and took an egg. He held it up to his cheek, and he raised his eyebrows – Please?

And then his face shifted as it took on a hint of mischief. His expression mimicked one I’d first seen when he was a mere toddler. That day, I had given him some food in a glass bowl with the statement, “Be careful. This is a big boy bowl.” He had watched my face, calculating my response, as he pushed the bowl off his high chair tray onto the ceramic tile. This time, the consequence was minimal as he playfully ripped open the wrapper of the peanut butter egg. A satisfied look overtook his face as if to say, Now what are you going to do? I laughed.

In the end, he ate the candy egg. But just one. Our “argument” was all in fun, and was well worth it to see that mischievous expression again—the one that so easily transported me right back to his (much) younger days when he was still a toddler in the high chair.

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Snacks

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The idea of a snack in my house has been evolving lately. It used to be that the kids would ask for a snack, and they wanted some crackers. I would put some crackers in one of our little plastic bowls with a handle, and they would sit quietly in front of their latest art project or a favorite tv program and eat the crackers. As the kids grew, they began to add a little protein to their snacks—yogurt, string cheese, peanut butter. For the most part, my children have been pretty good about eating healthy snacks.

Fast forward to the teen years. Well… to today. I had just arrived home from work and was preparing to make dinner. Mondays involve lots of evening activities, so dinner is quick. I opened the fridge and started to pull out the leftovers to go with the pasta that was happily boiling away in a pot on the stove. I found a great variety of leftovers: a bowl of baked ziti, some deviled eggs, a chunk of meatloaf. I studied the meatloaf as I removed it from the fridge. Huh… I would have sworn the piece was (quite a bit) bigger, but I have moments in which my memory is not what it used to be. But then a thought crossed my mind.

“C, did you have some meatloaf after school?” I questioned. Total stab in the dark here.

He looked up from his iPad, staring at me blankly for a long moment. “I might have.” He turned back to his iPad, no further explanation. Really, none needed.

“Protein,” W said walking by me through the kitchen. “Growing boys need protein.”

Yep. Meatloaf has now become an acceptable snack. Along with spaghetti and meatballs, chicken parmesan, a ham and cheese sandwich (with some pepperoni thrown on for good measure), half a dozen eggs­­—you get the picture.

I’m going to need a third job….

Culinary Issues

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My culinary kid admitted to something by accident last night. And now I know the truth.

He started the school year in his culinary program with the basics: knife skills, chopping and cutting, and moved on to stocks, soups, salads, and sandwiches. I asked him if he got to bring anything home. “No Mom. We package it and sell it in the café,” because yes, vocational schools have cafés where teachers, students, staff, etc. can buy lunch and ready made dinners. It’s a great idea, really. Except for the fact that the culinary students don’t get to take any food home to test on their parents.

Second semester, my son moved to baking, and he has been studying the various processes involved in baking. So far, I have heard about the banana bread, the blueberry crumb cake, and the rolls. For the last two weeks, I’ve been hearing about the rolls. When I (once again) asked him if he would be bringing any of his baked goods home for sampling, he said no. Then he said, “The blueberry crumb cake wasn’t very good, anyway.” Okay then.

Last night, we were talking at the dinner table, and he started to talk about the “sculpture” he made in the middle of the school lunch table from everyone’s trash, i.e. leftover packaging. (In our house, we have a long history of making things out of—um—recyclables. That’s just the way we roll…). “First, I had a milk carton, then another milk carton, then the big bag from the rolls I brought, then another milk carton, then the ‘mushroom’ I made from my lunch bag….”

Stop. Right. There. My mind got stuck on the big bag from the rolls I brought. I didn’t hear anything else that was part of the sculpture because my mind stopped at that phrase. I realized he brought rolls from culinary.

“I’m sorry. Did you say you brought rolls to school?”

He stopped talking and looked at me with a crooked half-grin, then quickly looked away. “Yeah,” he said, fidgeting in his chair. He turned back to his siblings and continued his story, trying his best to ignore the piercing stare I was throwing directly at him. “So anyway, I offered one to my—“

“And you gave them out to your friends? At school? Without bringing any home?” Clearly, I must have misheard him.

“Yeah, Mum.”

“Why didn’t you bring one home so I could try it?” After all, I’ve only been asking since September, I wanted to say.

“Because I only brought six,” he paused here while he attempted to concoct a reason. “And I had plans for them.” And he turned back to his siblings and started talking about the people who were lucky enough to get a roll. Freshly baked. From his culinary class.

“You know what, C?” I interrupted his story.

“What, Mom?”

“I’m going to bake some cookies tomorrow, and I’m not going to give you any.” He turned to me. I looked him right in the eyes, my stare intense and unwavering. “Because I have plans for them.” I winked and smiled.

So now he knows the truth.

Temperature Check

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It has been a cold winter; there is no question about that. Even in the early days of March, the morning temperature still hovers around the 0° point. One day recently, I went into the kitchen at just about the crack of dawn and glanced at our indoor/outdoor thermometer. The outdoor temperature read -1°. This fact barely registered in my brain; the morning low had been nearly the same for days, maybe weeks.

I went about my early morning business packing lunches, filling water bottles, and overseeing the consumption of breakfast. My mind was not fully on the task at hand because I was pondering the day ahead. W came to the kitchen, puttered around for a minute longer than usual, and fixed himself breakfast. C stumbled down the stairs next. He stood in front of the open fridge for a moment, declared the space void of anything edible, and began packing his backpack.

Sandwiches were made, thermoses filled. I moved on to water bottles. J made her way down the stairs, popped a bagel in the toaster, and sleepily sat at the table. I pulled the pitcher of water from the fridge and began pouring it into the bottles.

“OH MY GOSH!” J exclaimed, startling us all. “Why is it so cold out?!”

Why the alarm? I wondered. Not registering that I had already checked the temperature, I looked at the windowsill. The thermometer read -17°. My mind ticked back through its stash of morning snapshots. Confusion tugged at the edges of my memory. It wasn’t that cold a few minutes ago. Was it? Had it really dropped so fast? What was going on? All of these thoughts slipped through my mind, one after the other, like a deck of cards being shuffled.

Overhearing the conversation, W came in to the kitchen from the living room. “I suppose I should change that back to Fahrenheit, huh?” he said. He picked up the thermometer and pressed the Celsius/Fahrenheit toggle button. He ducked his head to hide the mischief evident in his satisfied smirk as he made a quick retreat to the other room.

Yes, we always have to be on our toes in my house. You just never know who is up to mischief!