Enough with the socks, can we now discuss the approximate eleventy metric tons of food my children now consume during any given week?
It's just too ho-ho-ho-ironical for words, after spending most of my 27 (non-consecutive) months of pregnancy worried about my diet and calorie-intake-to-vomiting ratio, and then even more months of worried about their diets and how much milk they were getting and how many ounces they were gaining, and then obsessively coaxing hundreds of tiny wee spoonfuls of baby food into their mouths and wondering if they were eating enough and peeing enough and pooping enough...that now I'm surrounded by a pack of giant strapping boy-children who NEVER STOP EATING.
Someone is ALWAYS hungry. (And conversely, someone else ALWAYS seems to be pooping. It's the circle of life groceries!) One granola bar is no longer an acceptable snack, unless it's immediately followed by ANOTHER granola bar and a side of Goldfish crackers and maybe a bowl of pistachios. Fifteen minutes after that, the bellies are back, skulking around the kitchen for graham crackers.
We go through two giant boxes of Cheerios a week, and close to four gallons of milk. Two loaves of bread, minimum. I am perpetually out of eggs (and I should point out that only Ezra and Ike actually eat the eggs, but together manage to do a great deal of damage, what with their two-scrambled-eggs-a-day habits). (EACH!) We're officially in the Family Size range for anything packaged or boxed and the answer to the question "Hey are we almost out of peanut butter and jelly?" is yes. ALWAYS, ALWAYS YES. The other day I heard Noah refer to bananas as a "beginning of the week" food, since they're usually gone by Wednesday or Thursday.
This weekend, while we were putting away the groceries, Ezra happened to find a pint of raspberries in one of the bags. A pint of raspberries that I thought would last us a week, or at least a few days. He ate the entire damn thing in one sitting.
For breakfast, Ike eats a pancake or waffle, a handful of Cheerios, two eggs, a banana and/or some berries (NOT THIS WEEK, THOUGH, THANKS ZAH), two cups of milk and sometimes a container of yogurt.
Two hours later, he has second breakfast of a cheese stick, more Cheerios and more fruit. Maybe any leftover yogurt.
You know, something LIGHT, especially since he eats lunch only an hour after that. And don't even try to talk to him after his nap until I get him back in the high chair for his after-nap pre-dinner supper-snack.
Seriously. I think I maybe gave birth to a hobbit.
And Noah, who once lived for two full years on peanut-butter crackers and Cheerio dust, is now a giant solid body of BIG KID who will eat just about anything if he's hungry enough. And he's almost always hungry enough. He wants seconds and thirds. He gets a late-afternoon snack at school and still gets off the bus talking about what he wants to eat when he gets home. (Answer: ALL OF THE THINGS) He has been known to start whining about being hungry while STILL CHEWING.
We tried keeping a designated Snack Drawer in the fridge for them — mostly because I just really, REALLY wanted to sit down every once in awhile without hearing "Mom, I'm hungry" 30 seconds later. I positively filled the bottom vegetable crisper with a ton of healthy, carefully portioned-out snack options: milk boxes, water bottles, cheese, containers of nuts and granola and fruits (fresh AND dried), carrot sticks, yogurt, etc. I told them that they were welcome to help themselves to anything in the snack drawer whenever they wanted.
They managed to strip that drawer bare in less than 24 hours. The Snack Drawer concept was officially retired less than a week later, when I discovered that Ezra was apparently helping himself to midnight snacks of yogurt-in-a-tube, of which he would eat half and save the rest for later...under his pillow.
Don't get me wrong. It's all awesome. They're all healthy and fit and full of energy for swimming and karate and tree-climbing mayhem. It's not like they're binging on soda and candy here — Ezra's favorite snack in the world is a sliced-up avocado, for God's sake. (I buy half a dozen avocados a week, yet cannot remember the last time I had any on hand for guacamole.) They're just...growing boys, I know.
It's still a bit bonkers to witness, though. And pay for. And to imagine what it's going to be like in a few more years, when I have a pack of teenagers.
Forget the college savings plan, people, I think I'm going to set up a trust fund just to keep us in groceries through high school.
