Before we moved home to Florida, my girls and I took a quick trip over to London to visit a dear friend. While we were there we stayed extremely busy and had a great time but or schedule left little need or time for snacking and you know what I noticed? My girls were eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, all of it, every time! When we returned to Dublin I adjusted our daily schedule and took out our usual morning snack. We had breakfast, an earlier lunch (usually around 11) then after nap we had a small afternoon snack before hubby came home for dinner. The girls continued to eat well at meals and even stopped asking for snacks.
We continued the newly adopted schedule when we moved back to Florida, that is until Honeybun started Pre-K. They do a snack time at 9:15 (!!!) in the morning. As school starts at 9, many parents just bring in the child’s breakfast to have during that snack time but we are up by 7:30 and hubby usually drops Honeybun at school on his way into work, around 8:15 so she would be way to hungry to wait. We also now don’t eat lunch until she’s home which is usually between 12:15 and 12:30 so Sugarplum and I require a morning snack also.
I’ve been very strict with only sending healthy snacks to school with Honeybun , usually fresh fruit or veggies so long as I have it. The first few days Honeybun would come home saying “Mommy, so-and-so had goldfish. She told me my snack was gross.” Honeybun’s favorites are bell pepper, grapes, clementines, apples or banana though she has in the past taken mushrooms, salad, tomatoes and green beans. She even went through a seaweed phase where she was taking dried seaweed sheets (unfortunately we ran out and I can’t find more locally…will have to wait until we’re on the road near a Trader Joe’s again!).
Her school also does ice cream for snack every Wednesday which parents can pre-order at an extraordinary cost. I’ve never done it due to the cost and my “healthy only” decision. The first week Honeybun was upset and the 2nd week the teacher actually asked me if I knew it was available because there was only one other boy that didn’t have it. The 3rd week I talked to Honeybun before school, explaining it was an ice cream day but she wasn’t going to have it again because she got her ice cream after dinner. Her unusual-for-kids snack choices I think gave her a label as “the weird one” which bothered her at first, but now I think she likes the attention she gets from having strange things and she hasn’t even brought up the ice cream since the first month!
