Lost Lunch

On Friday I discovered three guaranteed ways to lose any chance you may have had at eating your lunch, or any other lunch. I should explain that on days when I have a home visit almost immediately after school I tend to take my chances and buy a school lunch. This requires me eating with my very adorable children as they eat lunch which is always an adventure because while cute they have yet to develop anything resembling table manners or hygeine. Part of each meal involves retrieving children from under the table because for some reason lost to me food eaten off of the nasty preschool floor tastes infinitely better than the same food presented on a nice clean plate or a relatively clean table. Entertainment devised by the children on some days consists of dropping food and then laughing when someone else scrambles to the floor to eat it. Yes, three and four year olds have wicked senses of humor. Anyway, the three guaranteed ways to lose your desire to eat.
1) Open the container that your lunch is in and take a bite. Then position the container so that when the child seated behind you who has a trach coughs they spray your entire lunch with the bits of slime that emerge. As a bonus you may also be slimed.
2) Feed the children green cookies before lunch and then allow them to eat their lunchs. Then have one child take a few steps from the table and vomit. Vomiting green cookies is something that I could have gone all of my life without seeing and been perfectly content. Although he gets points for not getting any on himself...if only I could say the same for the floor.
3) Return from taking the comiting child to the nurse's office (where you have to sit with him holding the bucket until his mother shows up and informs you that his little sister has been sick for the past few days with the same thing - resist the urge to hit her) and suction the trach of the coughing child from #1. Discover more green treasures and dodge slime with minimal success. Try to remove green treasures and slime while convincing an unhappy protesting child that this really is for her own good and without contaminating anything.
If that does not slow down your appetite you have a more robust appetite than I possess. I did not feel queasy, I just no longer was interested in the lunch that i had once planned on eating nor anything else for a while. I also did not eat anything green that day...or the next day. Yuck!!!