So Owen came home with his sandwich still in his lunchbox. I asked why he didn’t eat it and he said because he wasn’t hungry. Hmmmm. Odd. But okay, kids are kids, it might be possible.
Fast forward a bit and he says “GUESS WHAT I HAD AT LUNCH TODAY?” And proceeds to excitedly tell me he had a [soft] pretzel from the lunch line!
Wait. What?
Yes, the cafeteria has them available for purchase—and he’s talked about them before and how he wants one—but we hadn’t yet gone over his lunch account/account number with him so we had NO idea how he actually got the pretzel since there was no way to pay for it. And of course, asking him questions got us nowhere.
Us: Owen, how did you get the pretzel?
Owen: The lady behind the pretzels gave it to me.
Us: But how did you pay for it?
Owen: She just gave it to me.
Us: You were IN the cafeteria line?
Owen: Yes.
Us: Was everyone getting pretzels? (Thinking maybe it was some special school-wide thing.)
Owen: No.
Us: And no one asked you to pay for it?
Owen: No.
So I emailed the teacher asking if she had ANY idea what might have happened, as we were somewhat concerned he got a pretzel without paying for it (though we didn’t mind that he got a pretzel).
Then I attended the PTO meeting and asked the principal about it, telling her we did have a lunch account but hadn’t yet explained it/taught him about it yet. She said that for the first week or two, the kids can tell the lunch ladies their name and they will deduct it from their account. So I figured okay, that’s obviously what happened. Except Tom asked Owen if they asked his name and he said no. Hmmm. When I got home from the meeting, the teacher had emailed me back saying that right now they are giving the lunch ladies the lunch numbers, so Owen was probably not aware that they told the cafeteria worker his lunch number. Which I guess is good…but you’d think they’d LET THE PARENTS KNOW THAT.
We told Owen it was okay he got the pretzel and we’re glad he took the initiative to do it on his own, but he can’t just decide to do that whenever he wants because a) he doesn’t eat the lunch we packed and b) it costs money. He said he didn’t want any more pretzels, so we’ll see. 🙂