Back To School

We are crap at back to school

And by we, I mean me.

Tracey is a machine. This is the time of year you want to be a fly on the wall at our place. Not so you can watch the mayhem, but so you can stay the hell out of Tracey’s way.

She has to sort uniforms and book lists, all while attempting to scrub the feral off our kids.

My role, in this fair and equitable distribution of duties, is to reinsert the making up of lunch boxes back into my daily routine.

The first step of which is to remember school starts up the following day.

“Where are the lunch boxes?” Tracey called out to me a few years ago.

“Bottom drawer,” I called back. Where we always keep them.

Next thing you know her head was in the shower with me.

“Are you serious? You haven’t made lunches?”

Hadn’t made lunches and hadn’t gone to the shops to buy stuff to make lunches with: I was essentially attempting to score baskets in a cricket match.

Our kids got dry two minute noodles, popcorn and a cold party pie for their first lunch of that year.

You might be wondering why I’m even concerned about this, given we’re spending the next year or so living in a bus and home-schooling our kids? Well, the thing is the youngest three are being shipped off to class for the first couple of weeks of the year.

Miss4, in particular, is super excited to be meeting her would-have-been classmates. She’s going to be their digital pen pal on our travels. Whereas I’ve tasked Miss7 and Miss9 with collecting as many of the smart kids’ contact details as they can, just in case we get stuck on a maths problem.

So this year, just like the last twenty, we’re coming off the two month holiday break with the stress of back to school.

Well, one of us is.

This year, while I head to ALDI in search of easy, inexpensive and wonderfully tasty lunch ideas to stock our pantry with, Tracey will have a well-deserved break from ordering and covering the book list.

And like the wonderful and considerate partner she is, she’s promised to stay out of my way while I get lunches sorted.

“I’ll probably have a nice long shower,” she just told me.

Okay, so like the wonderful and considerate and sarcastic partner she is.

You can stay up past midnight baking cakes and biscuits and slices if you get the urge, but my 20 years of back to school experience top tip for you is it’s hard enough, what with organising books and uniforms and getting your head around the new routine after such a gloriously long break. So this year you should give your blood pressure and your account a chance to ease into the New Year and head for ALDI to make sure your pantry is stocked and ready to tackle the task of creating creative and healthy lunch boxes.

Here are some lunch box suggestions to put your mind at ease over the coming weeks:

Raising a family on little more than laughs

Thank you to ALDI for supporting our family and sponsoring this post.