Things I Miss Friday - play with your food edition

I miss having puzzles and games on my food.

I haven't found any "grown-up" (i.e. not sugar-laden) oatmeal packets with trivia questions on them.  As it is, I need to just buy some plain oats instead of the flavored oatmeal, so there goes the trivia entirely, but it got me thinking.

When I was little, I read all...the...time.  Every morning I'd read my cereal box, the milk container - whatever was around.  Same went for lunch time.  There was a short period of time where my siblings and I ate lunch at school (a rariety in my hometown - 99% of kids go home or out to lunch).  The school system doesn't have any cafeterias that serve food (just large rooms with tables that they call the cafeteria) so it was always a brown bag situation.

Now, what could be more boring than a brown bag lunch, right?  Ah, but that is where you'd be wrong.  Once my brother started school (so all three of us were in school), my mom went back to work nights and my dad worked during the day, so we always had a parent available.  What this meant, though, was that it was our dad that made our lunches at night for the next schoolday - and he was having none of that boring brown bag stuff.

My dad would make our lunches after we went to bed so what would be both in and on the bag would be a surprise.  That's right - on the bag.  What was on our brown lunch bag?  Word games!  He would take a black marker and draw word finds and crossword puzzles and word scrambles for us; the difficulty would change depending on whose lunch it was.  For my brother (since he was only five or six), he might have a 3-letter by 3-letter grid and have to find the word "dog" - which would be right across the top (one of the cutest things I ever remember from my childhood).

The best part about this is that it feels like an interpretation on a burgeoning family tradition.  My father's parents came to this country from Estonia (by way of Sweden) and spoke very little English (very, very little - like almost none).  Since in those days it wasn't as easy as it would be now to get things to read in Estonian, my grandfather would make up his own things, including his own crossword puzzles.  He would design a whole crossword puzzle in Estonian and then solve it.  (I'm guessing that the fun was more in the creation than the solving.)  I didn't know about this until long after he had passed away, probably twenty years after my last brown bag lunch, and didn't put this all together until a few more years after that.

I think this all contributes to my view that every moment of one's day can be a learning opportunity, but now I think it also chimes with the idea that food/mealtime should be fun and interesting.  My family always had lively mealtimes and I feel like my lunch bag games were a way of taking that with me to school.

Now I usually eat my lunch at my desk at work, as I think most working adults do.  We should all get out and play.

Comments

[tarasg]

What a great family tradition!

[Things I Miss Friday – play wi]

[...] See the original post here: Things I Miss Friday – play with your food edition [...]