Brown Bag Lunch

If one ever needed any evidence that I took mothering lessons from Joan Crawford rather than from Florence Henderson, it came this morning in the form of a brown bag lunch.

It was a typical morning and I was barking out directions to Thing 2.  Clean up noodles off floor?  Check!  Remove underwear from ceiling fan and stuff into drawers (i.e., out of sight, out of mind)?  Check!  Take my bra off the cat and return to me?  Check! Check! Check!  All was going well.

Except when the schoolbus pulled away, I noticed that his brown bag lunch was still sitting on the kitchen table.  Surprisingly, this happens quite infrequently.  This was the first time I ever drove to school to deliver his brown bag.  (Most of the time I just let him beg table scraps from the other kids).

The school secretary pointed me to a small wooden table just inside the door of the school where I was to place his lunch.  There was already a bag there, with a child's named calligraphied on it in thick black Sharpie and with edges folded so precisely it made me weep.  It looked like this:

I quickly grabbed a pen  and started to scribble "Thing 2" on my son's bag.  Since I wasn't leaning on anything, the pen poked through the bag, piercing the rotten apple inside.  The Fluffernutter and Skittles sandwich got soaked and the wine cooler?  I don't even want to go there.