A slave to peanut butter

If you were to cut my son open, I don’t think you’d find the usual innards that make up most humans. instead, you’d see nothing but a light, creamy brown color because I’m almost SURE that he is made up of nothing but peanut butter.

Ok, I admit, you might find a few pepperonis and tomato sauce floating around, but mostly it would be the PB.

The kid can eat some peanut butter. In fact, I think he’d be content if that’s ALL I fed him.

I estimate that in my time on this earth as a parent, I’ve made somewhere in the neighborhood of just over 3.7 billion school lunches. Neither of my kids wanted to eat in the school cafeteria. I think my daughter ate ONE LUNCH there, and then not only did she refuse to eat for a week, she wouldn’t even say any words that started with the letter C.

For my daughter’s lunch, it was always a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Every day. For 13 years. We tried a couple of those frozen peanut-butter things (I can’t remember what they were called now), but they seemed about as appealing to me as a sponge that I might use to clean up any of the spilled ingredients I had after making her usual sandwich.

So my second thought after my son was born (my first thought occurred while I was in the room where they were doing the C-section, and I thought, “Oooooo. This is sooooo cool.” Somehow, I’m not sure that’s what my wife thought) was, “Oh Boy! No more making school lunches. I bet this kid will eat whatever unidentifiable food his school cafeteria will make!

Ok, maybe that wasn’t my second thought. But it was definitely in the top 10.

And I couldn’t have been MORE wrong. Somewhere, around the age of two, he just stopped eating anything that didn’t start with the letter P or contain at least as much sugar as a dozen donuts.

So when he was ready to head out the door for his first day of kindergarten, there I was, back in the kitchen, knife in one hand, two slices of bread waiting in front of me.

We have since graduated from peanut butter sandwiches to peanut butter crackers. Each and ever day, it’s the same thing – five peanut butter crackers. His lunch is as predictable as the questions my son asks me every day. Oh wait . . .

Well, I guess if you’ve got to be a slave to a certain food, smooth peanut butter isn’t a bad one. It’s pretty mellow and laid back. I’m sure if the Commodores had mentioned a food in their song “Easy (like Sunday morning)” it would have been smooth peanut butter.

I mean he could wanted something horrible in his lunch, like say bologna. And knowing all the while that there might have been some of that leftover meat substance stuck down in the bottom of his lunch bag every day. Now that would have been a rough road to travel.