Just been on a school trip and boy,you should have seen the crap that emerged form the lunch boxes....

[moondog]

Fruit Shoots,cheese strings,those cartons of 'meat'(sorry,industrial slurry) and cheese,weird yoghurts that don't need to be refrigerated and have a 'best before' date of 2018.
The healthiest thing was probably a plastic bread sandwich with some sort of processed chicken slice in it.

When I see their little shining faces and strong bodies,exuding energy ,and then see what they are fuelling themselves with,I want to take said cheese strings and garotte their parents.

I do eat celery. It has fibre and water, both good things. I don't require that everything I eat be Perfect Food, I just prefer to eat things with some redeeming characteristics. (And yeah, ok, Coke has water in it, but that's it.)

Sheesh there are a lot of perfect parents on this site. It exhausts me. (and I'm pretty darn close to being perfect )

mercy agree with you about the genetics- DS1 and ds3 have been through every test going to find out why they're so small, genetics (unfortunatley on DH's side) were all they could suggest after medicals, food diaries etc- the nutritionist ahd 'no advice to offer us'

I have said it before and I will say it again.....

I am a perfect mother......tis just that I got the wrong kiddies to go with my perfectness!!

Coke has redeeming qualities. especially when mixed with brandy.

ice cold pepsi with tons of ice (not diet pepsi) full fat sugar pepsi yummmmy

I can't drink coke since my son went to BIBIC a few weeks ago.. and in the nutrition advice was the Truth About Coke. Snippets like.. if you leave a t-bone steak in a bowl of coke, in two days it will have dissolved, bone and all!
Truck drivers in the US (and some in the UK) is it to clean out their engines..
It cleans the toilet a treat.. better than limescale remover..
It is commonly used in manny countries to clean the blood off the road quickly after a bad RTA ]shock]

I just can't bring myself to drink it anymore even though I have always loved it..

I would give ds an allergy free lunchbox but for a trip out it would contain marshmallows, kinnerton chocolate, soy butter on the whitest bread I could find with no additives, crips (albeit it ready salted) and some sort of fruit bar (albeit real fruit). So not the healthiest lunch box - but the one that would resemble the other children.

I get mad at Kindys that ban ready salted chips and then suggest a nice ham sandwich instead - which is just as salty and has MSG to boot. I think their concept of healthy eating is warped.

On the size thing, my ds has always eaten a ton, and is very skinny, whilst my dd was pretty picky (getting better!) and is almost as big as him although she is 16mths younger. I've stopped worrying too much. Luckily they both like fruit and vegetables - ds very keen on the five a day thing - thinks it is some sort of competition! Their lunches are a bit of a mix, usually white bread (not plastic, but still white) and crisps, but usually two fruit and a variety of salad. Generally it's much better than mine!

Funny, I hadn't thought of putting junkfood in the lunchbox for a trip, I would have just made a normal lunch- ham sandwich with wholemeal bread, bottle of fruit juice, sliced up fruit, nothing flash. In fact dd does have a trip planned for Friday so might have to reconsider...

of course clean your teeth after drinking lovely pepsi.

NQC - we are also BabyBel addicts but I am fairly sure there is something wrong with them. They seem very processed - and all the packaging [horrors]

Plus they cost about £2 or something awful, and are gone in about an hour once DP and DS get a whiff of them.

sleepyjess - you will get over it ! The caffiene fee stuff id like fresh water

jeez i think someone slipped a vodka in mine that last post was like one of cods !

Not perfect at all - or even anywhere near it. (With a ds as picky as mine, the smug-o-meter got banished to the back of the cupboard a long time ago! )

I just don't like novelty foods. Ham is not, by definition, bear-shaped and cheese is not string. Fact. What's wrong with just giving the little blighters the actual, genuine, honest-to-goodness foodstuff?

money probably, ham from the deli is much more expensive

Yeah, the packaging is dreadful. The cheese tastes like havarti, very very mild.

Waitrose do Food Explorers cheese sticks, which I used to get, but DS1 got a taste for Babybel from school friends. I think the packaging is part of the appeal, tbh.

What's the point of that Billy Bear "ham"?

1. You can't see it's bear shaped when it's sandwiched between 2 slices of bread
2. Why would a child who won't eat ham eat something that resembles his cute little bedtime pal?
3. What the hell is is made of?

Well yes, I was just going to post the same. Whenever I find something that ds really really likes, it is invariably over packaged. He has just got into drinking loads of soya milk, out of small cartons.

I think they like having something pre-portioned in child sizes, and they also think that they are in some way managing to prepare the food, by unwrapping it.

Am trying to think of things with great natural packaging. Satsumas and hard boiled eggs come to mind.

My ds's favourite sandwich filling is hommous, sometimes with cucumber, and the other day he ate 7 satsumas (he's just turned 2) plus he can polish off a good 3 weetabix for breakfast, and doesn't like any other breakfast with sugars on (ie will eat krispies not ricicles, cornflakes not frosties)

however, he loves his 'bikkits', and has -just- developed a little taste for 'weeties' after our holiday (where he had one bikkit and ahem a few more weeties!)

He had to have a lunch box for an activity on holiday, and he had - a wholemeal egg and cress sandwich (pre-made courtesy of tescos) two satsumas, a humzinger, a snack pack of jammie dodgers, and some quavers. He threw the quavers away, ate all the sandwiches, and fruit, and shared the jammie dodgers with the two boys who'd helped him open the packet (who incidentally both had choc spread sandwiches, and big bags of crisps)

So am I leaning towards good mum or bad?

I have to weigh in and reluctantly defend cheese strings. My db used to edit a parenting supplement to a national newspaper and cheese stings wanted some positive editorial as they were advertising. He refused on the grounds that they were crap food for kids but he had to back down when he was informed that yes they were simply cheese, more processed than most but still just cheese.
Babybels are just cheese too, and the wax acts as a preservative so there are no additives.

dd saw a 'billy bear' in the supermarket on the weekend and said 'What is it!? ' in a faintly horrified voice. LOL

Billy Bear is my son's favorite sandwich filling. That and the Barbie Princess one. (My son is 14 :))

don't you ever worry that your children will rebel and just eat all the bad stuff when you're not looking? or when they're older

(And he is NT btw....)