No Fun Dip, No Feast

The Fun Dip is gone. She’s been saving it since Valentine’s Day, waiting to eat it as her first piece of candy after lent. It’s been sitting in the pantry next to some tootsie rolls and an air head for over a month. Well, yesterday I noticed it wasn’t there. I asked her about it, and she got very quiet. She said, “Well, you know when dad picked me up, he said I could get a snack. I told him I wanted Fun Dip and he said that was okay… so I already ate it.” She followed it up with, “I told God I was sorry, though.” I then asked her what God had to say about that, and she said “Nothing, I guess he thought it was okay.” I wanted to be mad at her, but I didn’t make a big deal out of it. She is only 5, and she’s made it through some very tough “candy occasions” (Valentine’s Day, piñatas at birthday parties, Easter Parties, etc) and eaten very little of it. (as far as I know – the tootsie rolls are still there, but I don’t know how many of them she had to start with) Even if she did falter a few times, this was still definitely a sacrifice for her.

The Feast – Yesterday was her Easter Feast at school. When I was a kid I would have been so excited about something like this, but when you’re Cayla, this is devastating. She was unbelievably stressed about having to go to the feast, because she doesn’t eat “feasts”. Everyone was assigned something to bring main dish, side dish, dessert, appetizer, etc. We were assigned dessert, and she doesn’t even really eat dessert. She picked out an Easter cake at the store, but she assured me that she wasn’t going to eat any of it. I went ahead and packed her a lunch “just in case”. We do these “just in case” lunches any time the school announces that the class does not need to bring a lunch. This is usually on holidays or birthdays. Once we got a note saying _____ was bring pizza for his birthday. Well, _______ must have changed his mind to chicken nuggets. Cayla came home furious with me (and starving) because she had to eat snack time crackers for lunch. So to not risk the special lunch being Happy Meals or a Nugget tray, we do “just in case” lunches.
When I picked her up yesterday, I asked her about the Feast. She said she ate her lunch instead. They had “chicken things”, “big circle sausage”, “potatoes”, “some dip that wasn’t cheese dip”, “brownies”, “our cake”, and “strawberries that still had the green stuff on them” . She said there were more things, but she didn’t see them. I’m guessing the big circle sausage was probably summer sausage (and she probably would have liked it), but because it was “big” she didn’t eat it. I told her she could have eaten the strawberries up to the green stuff, and she said that she knew that, but “since I didn’t like too much stuff there and I liked everything in my lunch, I just ate my lunch.” In a nutshell, she passed up an awesome pot luck meal to eat her one-millionth turkey sandwich. I used to think that packing lunches would cease when she went to kindergarten, but now don’t foresee her EVER actually eating cafeteria food. In the end I could probably hold the record “most turkey sandwich lunches packed”.