Lunch for the Kid

The other day, my wife woke up sick and so the job of preparing the kid’s snack and lunch (they have a separate break for each) for school fell on me. My daughter didn’t believe I could prepare any thing, even though the plan was to just make a sandwich! If you replace “frozen waffles” with “Maggi” in the strip below, you’ll get exactly how our exchange went:
Like all men who can’t cook, I told her that she should consider it a privilege that the Great Master Chef was preparing her lunch that day. And that I would be throwing in a (readymade) cake piece for her snack.

Now her school is quite particular about the “no junk food” policy, and so she got hauled up that day. As instructed, she told her teachers that her mom was sick and that’s why she had brought junk food for lunch that day. Obviously, the teacher had to let it go (what else could she do, starve the kid?). But then, in passing, the teacher told the other teacher, “See, every time a kid brings junk food, she’ll say it’s because her mom is sick”. Unfortunately, my daughter heard the remark and was quite angry. “It was the truth, right? Why don’t they believe me?”, she asked when she got home.

Hmmm… maybe it would have turned out better if she’d told her teachers that junk food was all that her dad could prepare. After all, while moms may send junk food on the odd day because they’re running late or just too tired, it’s easy to believe that dads can’t make anything other than junk food, right?

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarAugust 16, 2017 at 12:13 PM

    A good one with human touch.

    Actually, what Aditi faced (namely the teacher not believing the truth told by the child) keeps on happening. I am full of sympathy for her.

    When I was a kind of some 8 years, I used to read Tamil stories and children magazines, encouraged by my mom. Hence I was far ahead of my peers in my ability to read and write. One day, the teacher when correcting a home work. He called me and asked who did my work. I told it was me. He didn't believe it. So demanded again. Since I was sticking to my stand, he started pinching my ears until I admitted to the falsehood, "My mom did that work". Looking back, now that the ears no longer pains, it was a complement I had received. The fact remains that adults often wrongly believe that the child is telling lies!

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