Project 365: August 31

Lunchboxes.

Lunchboxes are exceedingly important to some people, especially my little people.

I only have 4 children, but I think we've gone through enough lunchboxes over the years to fill an aisle at Target. There was always a cuter, better insulated, or just plain inconspicuous lunchbox to be had. That is, until last year, the year of the no-more-colored-pencils! Will got a new lunchbox last year because it was his first real year of preschool. The others were left to choose from the pile of old but not worn out lunchboxes from years past. They each chose one and the rest were discarded, leaving me with one empty spot in my house - yippee!

That was last year. Moving on...

Will still carries his royal blue matchbox car lunchbox, though I suspect if I'd given him a choice he might have wanted to pick out a new one this year. I didn't give him the choice.

Morgan and Caroline both lost their lunchboxes toward the end of last year and had to resort to carrying their lunches in recycled gift bags. We found their new lunchboxes at the L.L.Bean outlet this summer.

Katherine perused the catalogs all summer and circled and hemmed and hawed until she found just the right lunchbox (the pretty one in the middle) to match just the right backpack. We ordered them both in time (we thought) to get them before the school year began. The lunchbox came right away but the backpack was back ordered.

No problem, really, we can wait. We're pretty patient! Not!

Katherine continued to use last years beat up backpack while she waited for her new one to come, asking me every day after school if I'd gotten email notification that it was coming. Then, today she announced that another girl at school had ordered the very same backpack and was notified that it wasn't going to come at all. We hadn't received any such notice so I got online as soon as I could shoo her out of the computer room, and found out that, yes, there would be no perfect backpack.

After a brief (but could have been oh so much briefer!) boo-hoo, we decided we'll have to order a different backpack. The only problem, she'll now have a lunchbox that doesn't match her backpack.