Snacks Before Dinner Are Now Okay. Apparently.

red apple

It’s not often I’m surprised in this house. I mean genuinely surprised. But tonight I witnessed something I think I’d be hard pressed to find a precedent for – Tracey giving one of our kids a snack before dinner.

“Where did you get that?” Tracey asked Miss2.

“Apple,” said Miss2 simply.

Our little daughter was walking around the house taking tiny rat-like bites out of an apple. A meal of porcupines (a fun name for meatballs with rice and tomato soup) was being dished up, so apples were not supposed to be an option.

Not that we don’t have a box of apples on a shelf, but there’s a lid on the box and, in any case, it would have been a bit of an effort to reach.

“I asked you where did you get the apple from?” repeated Tracey.

I could tell from her tone she thought I’d given it to our daughter and was merely collecting evidence. But I knew that in this instance, for once, I was innocent.

“Dare,” said Miss2, pointing at Miss10’s lunchbox, which was perched by the sink with four others.

“You got the apple from that lunchbox?” asked Tracey, and Miss2 nodded confirmation and did some more gnawing.

This got on Tracey’s goat even more than the idea of me giving a kid a snack right before dinner. She called Miss10 into the kitchen.

“Why didn’t you eat your fruit at lunch time?” she demanded.

I felt sorry for my sweet girl, although if I’m perfectly honest I always think it’s a nice turnabout when someone besides me is in trouble in this house. But I just couldn’t see any way out of this for Miss10. There was nothing she could say to make this go away.

Boy, was I was wrong.

“Because,” she told her Mum, “it fell out of my lunch box and rolled between people’s feet.”

Yep, that’d do it.

And for the first time in the history of this household I saw Tracey give one of our kids a snack just as they were about to have dinner. Well, she swapped a new, clean apple to pry the festy one out of Miss2’s hands, but it’s the same thing, yeah? Actually, from where I was standing, it was more a cold war hostage exchange.

But the point is, whatever the reason, she did and I didn’t. And just like Miss2, I’m loving it.

apple

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“Raising a family on little more than laughs”

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