Planning ahead just isn’t a thing for most teenagers. If they’re anything like the Hectic Kids, advance planning doesn’t start until very late in high school or in some cases after they get to college. And thinking about what they’re going to have for lunch the night before is a total non-starter. I mean, they’ve got fistfuls of snacks to eat before then, texts to reply to, and ugly snaps to send. Who wants to think about tomorrow…and especially lunch. Ewww…gross.
By the time my kids got to middle school, one of my goals was to have them making their own lunches. The idea was to gently move them towards preparing ahead of time. Unfortunately, these grand plans didn’t work out well. I mean, I had eight chances and I still couldn’t get it right…
More often than not I would hear “OMG, look what’s for lunch tomorrow. Ugh!”. Then, despite this knowledge I would still see a mad scramble to grab anything edible on the way out the door the next morning in an attempt to avoid the cafeteria proffered fare.
In an effort to ease that mayhem, I would often create grab-and-go baskets in the pantry and fridge. I would cut up carrots and put them in zippered storage bags. Same thing with celery. Sometimes I would make mini PBJ sandwiches too. Those all went into a basket in the refrigerator. The pantry was stocked with sports drinks in one baskets and quick snack foods in another. Prepackaged snack foods were intermingled with crackers, dried fruits, and other items, bagged individually. The idea was that the famished teens could grab a couple items out of each basket and have something reasonable to eat at school.
Those periods of pre-planning and execution were fairly rare. I would go great guns at the start of the school year. Then the process would die off. Then during finals for the trimester I would get a second wind and start the process again. Right after Christmas break I’d be all gung-ho and have my baskets filled aplenty. But for more than half the weeks in the school year the kids were pretty much left on their own.
Honestly, I felt badly about it…there are so many things I wish I’d done better.
So now we’re down to one teen at home. I feel almost like a real person now and have this odd notion we can keep up with her demand. I mean with eight kids getting out the door it was mayhem…how bad can it be with one?
Here’s the dirty little secret…it doesn’t matter if you have one kid or eight. Kids fill all your time. And things will be crazy out of control. It’s just the nature of the universe. Sure, you think you’ve got it all handled and then something comes along. With lots of kids you get more varied crises…but even with one you’re going to have a crisis every once in a while. And while it’s easier to deal with one crisis at a time, it’s still a crisis to your little darling. The same goes for systems. You can try to setup methods to do repetitive tasks, but they’re going to find ways to break down. Either the system will break by itself or your teen-saboteur will break the system for you. It’s just a matter of time.
Nevertheless, we’re going to start off this school year on a high note and see how long we can keep it going. If you want to nag me in a few weeks and see how I’m doing…I welcome that. Give me a yell in the comments and let’s talk about how to keep things on track and not totally derailed!
As part of my Back To School 2018planning, I went to the source of all grand ideas…Pinterest. I created a board of spectacular ideas for school lunches. Heck, in less than 30 minutes I pinned 104 posts. Those represent about 2,800 lunch ideas. I’m sure I can make them all. Really.
Seriously, feel free to use my legwork to help you out. Pop over to my Pinterest board and see if any of the posts grab you. There are some seriously awesome ideas there. Of course, it all comes down to the execution on those ideas. That’s where I usually drop the ball.
We’ve decided that we’re going to use a cheatsheet to make lunches the night before. We’re not only doing this for my teen high schooler, we’re also going to make lunches for home. That way I’ll be able to tangle back a little of the time I expend making lunch for whomever is home at lunch time. We can have up to six of us here for lunch, and I usually don’t find out until a few minutes before they start arriving. Since I work from home, everyone expects me to have lunch ready when they get here. That cuts into my days and really ruins my workflow. So I’m going to be leaning on everybody a bit more to ensure that they give me some idea of who will be here for lunch. Then the lunches will be planned and crafted the night before.
The advantage to this approach is that two of us will be making lunches together. On those nights when she has sports, I’ll try to carry more of the load. I’d like to get to a system where we’re figuring out the lunches over the weekend and prepping as much as we can then, but for the start of the year we’re going to work the night before. At least for a couple of weeks there won’t be any after school games…just volleyball practice. So her schedule will be fairly consistent.
We’re going to use the cheatsheet below as our guide. Feel free to click on it and download a printable copy!
As always, our goal is to make it a great day in the kitchen and I’m hoping that having this cheatsheet will keep us on track!
Coming Up…
Over the next few weeks look for additional info on great lunch ideas for your teens (and other kids)!
