*Trade you carrots for cookies?

Lunchtime, a vital and exciting time in every child's school day, or for that matter, a vital time in anyone’s day. Of all the years of lunchtime though, it's elementary school that sticks out most in my memory. My mom would pack my lunch everyday, and everyday I would eat just about the same thing. There was the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, always on wheat bread, with Adam's peanut butter and no added-sugar jelly. There was a sugar free apple juice, carrot sticks and Fignewtons. I would sit at the lunch tables and gaze at the other children with the Wonder bread sandwiches, Capri-suns and cookies and drool. How I envied those kids, with their processed sugars and food colorings. All I had to look forward to was a lousy Fignewton, which doesn't even count as a cookie in my mind. I would beg my mom for food like the other kids, but she just wouldn't budge. Nothing processed would enter my mouth for as long as I lived if she had anything to do with it.
And so, the challenge lay before me to do a little deal making. I offered up Fignewtons for cookies and surprisingly got some kids to partake in the trade, but only because they had never seen these strange things before and wanted to try it. After that though, that deal was shot and nobody wanted to trade. Carrots of course, were always a failure, trading those all you would get was celery, which was equally as lame in my mind. With the exception of "ants on a log", those were all right, as most things slathered in peanut butter are.
Looking back though, what I saw as my mother’s crude and unfair lunch packing, was actually an act of love. She wanted me to be healthy, and didn't want to create eating habits in me that would carry over to adult hood. Come to think of it, I ate better than just about any kid I knew, although at the time I thought it was the other way around. While I was overwhelmingly jealous of the kids with Lunchables, I later realized that not only are those horrible for you, but there really is no love it creating them. You don't take the time to cut little cheese and meat slices and portion them out, you simply run to the store and grab the thing. When I now picture my mom chopping apples or carrots into small pieces, cutting the crusts of my sandwiches, and writing my name on the brown paper bag with a big heart around it, I see the love that was crafted into the lunches, that I complained so much about. This is not to say that the Lunchable moms didn't care about their children, but I definitely thing the time put into making a meal holds significance.
If I look at my fridge and cupboard today, I would have to say my mom would be proud. The cereal is sugar free, the milk is soy, the bread is whole wheat and the peanut butter is Adam's. I'm living proof that the habits you learn when you're little carries over to adulthood. On a side note, my roommate, who was the Lunchables kid in elementary school, only recently starting eating wheat bread and Adam's peanut-butter, when she moved in with me.