In addition to my Facebook page, which is starting to gain some likes, I'll be sharing photos on Instagram @lunchlessons.

Stop by and follow me.

I have decided to start a Facebook page and continue to document my lunch lady adventures.  Please come and like me at LESSONS FROM THE LUNCH LADY.  I miss you all and I hope this is a way we can all still keep in touch.

Thanks for all the love!

~W~

I just wanted to give my loyal readers a little farewell shout out.  I've decided to take a little break from blogging.  I'm not sure if I'll come back in a month, in six month, in a year or not at all.  I feel spread thin like butter and I'm not putting enough focus on areas of my life that should matter more than the cyber world. 

Farewell for now.

kisatrtle

An open letter to my children:

I think I have failed you. I think I have raised you with an entitlement gene that renders you incapable of actually working for things you desire.

I take full responsibly. I think that all parents want to give their kids more than what they had, but in doing so, I feel like I have handicapped you in ways that I couldn't foresee.

For example, you think that if you whine loudly enough that I will buy you anything, including a $25 personal blender. Why would a nine year old need a blender? When told no you fall completely apart and say things like "Why don't you love me?" or "I can't wait till my birthday, it's too long."

It's not even just things you WANT. It also an inability to clean up after yourself. It's like you feel entitled to make a mess and see who else can clean it. Or, worse yet, you act like you have no idea how to clean it up.

Middle and oldest told me they didn't know how to hand wash dishes because they've never done it before? Really, this is something that needs to be taught? It's not something you just know how to do?

Let's talk about the morning when the cat, dug all the liter out of her box and then peed on the floor. Did my oldest really think she could swifter that up?

The problem is so deeply rooted in our house that other than spending time on a missions trip, I'm not sure what to do.

My children think that $90 calculators should just be handed over. They think that if they rip their favorite jean shorts from Justice they should immediately be replaced. They think that expensive blenders are toys.

Maybe giving everyone a trophy even if they suck is a bad idea. Maybe rewarding everyone makes everyone believe they deserve to be rewarded. Maybe in an effort to preserve everyone's self esteem, we have created generations of children who think the world owes them something just for being in the world.

Don't get me wrong, if given enough time, my kids can figure out how to wash the dishes or clean the cat crap. They can clean the van or pick up their room. They can help paint the fence and vacuum the living.

So what's the problem, you ask? After they do it, they seem to think that because they did what needed to be done that there should be some type of reward, that there should be a trophy.

I worry that when that trophy, or that pat on the back or that "way to go" doesn't come, they will feel dismissed and unvalued.

And I blame myself.

Cotton candy grapes? Seriously? What is wrong with grape flavor? I don't think I wanna pay $6 a pound to have grapes that taste like cotton candy.

While I understand the growers motive, which he claims is to make kids want grapes instead of cotton candy, I think he is going about it all wrong.

Here's why.

Kids like grapes. If you're gonna change the flavor of something, why not focus on the cranberry? Or asparagus?

Kids need be taught from early on that this is what grapes taste like. Take it or leave it.

This whole idea sort of reminds me of the asshole of a nurse I had in the labor and deliver room when my middle daughter was born. I was having a lot of trouble latching her on. She just wasnt taking to it very well.

The uneducated woman attempting to help me said, "She just needs to get a taste of it," and preceded to dump a bottle of formula all over my chest.

Here's what I learned from that experience. Middle G still couldn't latch on and formula is sticky. If your child doesn't like grapes or won't try grapes, making them taste like cotton candy isn't the solution.

Designer grapes? This is what we are working on? How about feeding the hungry? Curing cancer? Making produce more affordable for those on a fixed income?

Cross pollinating or fruits to taste like candy? Well that should be significantly lower on the list.

Just my humble opinion.

I haven't been writing much about the pool this year. We had a slow start with a lot of rain in June, kids off at camp, and visits to grandparents houses.

It feels like we haven't been swimming much.

Where has the summer gone?

This is what I learned this week:

Bees will swoop. A bus full daycamp kids and their counselors were in the pool when a bee on steroids decided to swoop down and buzz them. That is a lot of screaming. A lot of screaming!!

Birthdays at the pool ROCK. I spent the day with great friends and family, cheese fries and sun. It doesn't get much better.

You can't predict the weather. We wanted to go to the pool in the evening to listen to a band that one of the lifeguards plays in. Sadly, it thundered and then poured and we never made it.

My sister's pool is even cooler. The kids and I are spending some time in NC with my sister and her family. It's even a better poolside perspective when it's from my sister's screened in porch and I'm watching my kids swim with their cousins.

Sprinkle in some water park fun. We hit the water slides today and it was a perfect way to spend a Friday.

What did you learn this week?

Photo credit www.washingtonpost.com

After first learning about the India school lunch poisoning that killed 23 children between the ages of 5-12, I thought please don't let this be true.

India has one of the largest free school lunch programs in the world feeding nearly 120 million children. State governments decide on menus and timings of the meals which cannot cost more than .03 cents to prepare.

Most cooks are paid no more than 40 rupees a day (.68 cents) and cannot make more than 1000 rupees a month or $17.

However, in an area where nearly HALF of all children suffer from malnutrition, the free midday meal remains one of the biggest incentives to sending children to school.

Even in light of this tragedy, the midday meal must remain.

The incident may have been an intentional act of malice perpetuated by Meena Kumari, the principal at the school. She purchased cooking oil containing large quantities of a very potent pesticide from a company operated by her husband.

Even after the cook questioned the apparence of the oil, Kumari insisted it be used. Even after the children complained that the food tasted bad, Kumari insisted that they eat.

Once the children began to vomit and loose consciousness, Kumari fled. After nine days on the run, she was arrested late last week.

She is claiming that she has been set up.

My heart breaks for the families of the children lost and for the two cooks. One tried to calm the children and reassure them that all was fine by eating the meal with them becoming violently ill as well. The other cook lost two of her three children.

She is quoted as saying "I am so horrified that I wouldn't grieve more if my only surviving child died." She also said she would never return to the school.

While much corruption remains, the good that the India midday meal provides does so much more. It is my sincere hope that the numerous branches of government can learn from this tragedy and begin to make changes to a highly mismanaged and corrupt system.

No ones says it better or with more conviction than Shweta Sharma, who is an Assistant Teacher at the Government Middle School in Deoghar City, Jharkhand.

Her entire piece can be found HERE and I urge you to read it.

Dear Anonymous

Why do you come to my blog just to bitch about it? I delete all your stupid comments. I honestly don't care what you think but let's clear a few things up.

Sarcasm is hard to convey in print so when I talk about things like the lifeguard cleaning the pool, I'm not "bitching about everything" and I certainly "wouldn't prefer the lifeguard asleep in her chair." Most of my regular readers grasp this concept.

I find it quite humerous that you read my blog only to mock it. I'm just going to throw this out there because maybe you don't know. You CAN stop coming here.

In fact, I wouldn't mind at all.

Have you nothing else to do but stop by blogs and complain about them? Perhaps you should consider employment. Most people don't consider reading blogs and watching YouTube videos employment. I realize coming up with all those witty comments feels like work but alas it truly isn't.

You are one of those people who post negative comments on Facebook pages you like. Why do you like Dove Soap if you just wanna tell people it smells like shit? I don't think you understand what "like" means.

Oddly enough, I'm sort of looking forward to your response to this. As I'm sure it's gonna be thought provoking and filled with misspellings.

Just to make it more entertaining, I think I'll read my blog and all the comments after searching for it on gizoogle which converts everything to gangsta.

At the very least, it will finally make whatever you have to say somewhat humerous cause nothing says "suck it" quite like gangsta.

Sincerely,

Kisa

Seems I haven't found all the time I was thinking I lost by working full time by having the summer off.

If anything, I seemed to have lost even more of it.

I was convinced that we would have thought provoking discussions on this roller coaster accident or that we might touch on the school lunch incident in India that left 22 children dead and a headmistress fleeing. I even thought we might talk about the ridiculous reporting on those Asiana pilot names .

I guess it's never to late to blog about it. Of course, every other blogger is going to be talking about the royal baby.

Here's hoping they don't go with Prince Albert. We can't have royalty named after a genital piercing.

Is it possible that my summer break is nearly half over?

Really?

Here's what we've squeezed in so far.

Little G went to camp. The camp sign was VERY happy to see me. Seriously? Am I the only one who noticed that?

Oldest went to Hershey Park with the band, Middle G. fell in love with One Direction at a concert that tested my parking lot patience to its limit. It took us over three hours to get home. However, I think the positive memories we made outweighed the negative.

We hit the road as a family and stopped in West Virginia to visit my mom. She's all settled in and feeling at home. The kids had fun creek stomping and making s'mores.

We've been to the pool, although the weather hasn't been very cooperative. We've hung out with friends. We've said goodbye to friends. We played our last baseball game.

We played mini golf with grandparents. We've had ice cream and played in the slip and slide. We've crafted. We've scrapbooked. We've attempted some Pinterest crafts.

We've been to gymnastics class and soccer camp. We've had a few campfires and we've slept in the backyard.

We've eaten Popsicles. We've posed for countless photos. Sometimes pretending we like each other.

We fired BB guns. We took a few hikes. We swam on top of a freaking mountain. One of the most beautiful state park pools I've ever been too.

In hind sight, we've made quite a few memories.

Middle G. holding the rooster we brought home from West Virginia for her BFF.

It was payment for taking care of Inky the Cat.

Can you see it?

The pool this week was a test of my patience. In fact, this entire week was a test of my patience.

Here's why:

No means no. I heard my girls and three of their friends say "Stop it. Leave me alone" to three boys who appeared to be attempting to untie their swim tops. I about killed them. I went down to the pool and told him to swim away, to point out his mother, and to make sure I didn't see anywhere near the girls. His response was that he came to the pool alone, with friends.

Don't drop your kid at the pool. WTF? Based on the above, if you are dropping your tween off at the pool it's pretty likely that he is acting like a jackass.

You aren't the only one at the pool. You can't throw your kid a volleyball while she's jumping off of the public diving board. You keep hitting my kid and it is annoying. Like really annoying. Aren't you a grow up?

If the pool is mostly empty, the lifeguard will clean the wall. The lady who nearly sat beside me at a mostly empty pool day seemed surprised that the lifeguard wasn't in her chair. She was scrubbing the pool wall. I guess the 25 swimmers in there weren't as important as the algae.

Deflating a raft isn't as easy as it appears. I had to deflate this penguin raft so it could travel to its new home and I truly hope there isn't video. I looked ridiculous.

What did you learn this week?

Dear Neighbors,

Is that really a U-haul in your driveway?  I so hoped you would change your mind.  I so hoped that you would decide that living beside me totally outweighed everything else.  Sadly, we all have to make money and it looks like work and family trumped me.

We sure have had a lot of laughs over the years.  Whenever I'm singing along to a song in the car and I don't know the words forevermore I will always say "Watermelon."  I will never be able to hear the words "last call" without thinking, "Why is is always last call?"

When we moved in my kids were six, three and one.  I remember when C joined all the Gs.  I still have a copy of the birth announcement I made for you.  Your little one looking so angelic in that picture.

Who am I going to borrow sour cream from?  Remember when Little G. wrote a story at school about all the food we "borrow" from you and his teacher asked me if we were having problems.  That's almost as funny as the time one of the kid's convinced their teacher we were Jewish.

We've been minature golfing, hayriding, and trick or treating.  We've been to the beach, where we found your husband in a radom parking lot, we've been dancing, we've had smore-making, crab cracking, siting my the fire with a drink fun.

Who can forget all the pool days and book club?

We've watched each other kids, we've put kids on the bus, we've taking kids off the bus.  We've been each other's emergency contacts.  We even lived through the 2011 floods and the 2012 Cholrine Gas spill. 

Every time 30 Rock is on, I will think of you.

Promise me this.  You will skype us for Modern Family in the fall.  You will still participate in book club and you will come and visit. 

The thought of watching Little C grow up on Facebook doesn't seem fair.  And Middle G has taught me that things should always be fair! 

I will miss you, my friend. 

Who knows, I may drive two hours just for some sour cream.

Best wishes on your new adventure!

~kisa~

P.S. Why do my kids always give me black hair? Do I have black hair?

I love me some Kenny Chesney. I mean what's not to like.

I also love me some Pittsburgh. I grew up not far from "the burgh" and I still love that city. So imagine my disappointment to learn that the Chesney fans that attended his recent Pittsburgh concert left nearly 60,000 pounds of garbage behind. This does not include the recyclables.

Really?

I spend countless hours a year telling little kids to be mindful of their trash. I explain to them, that while dropping it means they don't have to clean it up, it doesn't mean that no one has to pick it up.

According to Leroy Stotler Jr., president of Three Rivers Power Sweep in Apollo, it took his crew nearly 15 hours to cleanup.

He said the mess of half-eaten food, warm beer, couches, portable pools and other refuse was about five times that for an average Steelers game.

“People make their own toilets. Lots of those. Five-gallon buckets and cardboard boxes.” said Stotler, whose company leads the cleanup operation. “I'll leave that up to your imagination.”

I don't know about you but I just vomited.

I realize that concerts are big money makes and that the city collected nearly $500,000 in tax revenue. That being said, I don't care how much you spent on tickets, or alcohol, or transportation. Leaving a bucket of your shit in a parking lot takes disrespectful to an entirely different level.

The 100 of you arrested are even bigger assholes. In case you forgot, you can't hear the concert in prison.

Before my inbox is flooded with those of you in attendance who didn't so much as drop a gum wrapper, good for you. The world needs more people like you. But that makes what the other 20 percent of you did even more disturbing.

Pick up your own trash.

Keep your hands to yourself.

And if you can't drink without becoming an asshole, put in a CD and stay the hell home.

Dear Paula,

I'm not really sure what to say. Quite frankly, you've said quite enough.

You should first and foremost STOP TALKING and by all means when you talk to Matt Lauer on Wednesday try to look at least a little bit sincere.

I don't know who did the shotty editing on your first apology video that was almost immediately pulled, but I hope you fired them. My 12 year old could have done a better job.

This looks like a hostage video. This is the video of a desperate person but the problem is I can't tell if your desperately seeking actual forgiveness or if your desperately seeking the salvation of your brand.

I've read an annoying amount of coverage on this including this USA Today piece that clearly reveals exactly what Paula Deen said.

It's one thing to forgive a southern senior for an offensive slur but what you are quoted as saying isn't exactly that. Is it Paula?

Did you really say in your deposition about your racist comments that "It’s just what they are — they’re jokes ... most jokes are about Jewish people, rednecks, black folks ... gays or straights, black, redneck, you know, I just don't know — I just don't know what to say...I can’t, myself, determine what offends another person.”

You need better friends. I would clearly of indicated my offense.

Let's also talk about this "southern plantation wedding". Since you seemed incapable of determining what is offensive let me help you out. Young black servants at a wedding dressed like slaves? AYFKM? That's not just offensive, that's a deal breaker as evidenced by the companies trying to shake your racism off of their brand before they are tainted by association.

Howard Bragman, vice chairman of Reputation.com thinks you'll survive but you'll never be whole again. Bragman went on to say that when your obituary is written, this will be a significant part of it.

Ouch.

It's now your footnote and it isn't looking like you're gonna shake it anytime soon.

I'll watch your Wednesday interview in one form or another but I honestly can't fully convey my disappointment.

Adults should know what's offensive and what isn't.

Sincerely,

Kisa

It's that time of the year again.

That time when most of my days are spent lounging about at the pool and leisurely reading my book. That last sentence actually made me laugh out loud.

Let me rephrase.

It's that time of the year when I spend countless hours packing lunches that are never enough food to feed everyone. That time of the year when the number one rule is no drowning. That time of the year when my husband and I revive our debate about spray vs. lotion sunscreen. That time of the year when there are more inflatables in my car than children.

It's pool season.

Here's what we learned this week.

It's never too cold to get in the water. My son cannonballed into the pool last week when I'm sure water temps couldn't possibly have been much higher than 60 degrees. I thought for sure that he ruptured his eardrum because he couldn't hear for 24 hours after the jump.

Beetles can fly. I'm not sure why the grown adult woman sitting near me felt compelled to "rescue" beetle after beetle from the surface if the pool. However, she did entertain me for a short while until it just became super weird for me.

The green carpet of death has been removed. Because of badly poured concrete our pool owner thought concealing it with a fake grass green carpet was a good idea. That thing was a breeding ground for anthrax. It was so foul that I wouldn't let my kids walk on it and on more than one occassion I saw others letting their kids lie on it. I had to stop typing to vomit. I'm happy to report that the concrete has been repaired and the green carpet of death has been removed.

It's never to early in the season for some crack. Come on people. You can't tell me that you are unaware that your ass is showing. Pull up your pants. Or I'm just gonna start spraying sunscreen on it as a public service.

Cups. If you wanna save some money, skip the pool toys and bring some cups. Plain old plastic cups or even colorful disposible cups. Kids cannot resist them. It's like magic.

I recently heard the term facebragging and thought "AYFKM?"

Is this really something we should label? After careful thought and a quick scan through my own newsfeed, I reconsidered.

Facebragging is an epidemic and we need to stop it before we all turn into Molly Parker. She takes facebragging to whole new level.

Let's make a pact to end this nonsence.

We all know you're proud of your kid's grades. You don't have to post it. You might be surprised to learn this but we are ALL proud of our kids EVEN WHEN THEIR GRADES AREN'T PERFECT.

There is no such thing as a perfect life. Stop pretending yours is.

Someone should have told you a while ago that people respond better to people who keep it real.

I don't want to see pictures of your child carrying his potty chair filled with urine. Most kids figure out this skill or else their prom date brings them home A LOT earlier than agreed upon.

Facebragging works the other way too. Stop writing things like, "Will anyone miss me when I'm gone?" That's a baiting status. You are trolling for comments reassuring your worth. If you need to do this, you really should consider paying for therapy.

I guess, like me, you are wondering what isn't considered facebragging. I can hear you in the distance faintly saying, "Just what then can I post about? If you don't want to know about my perfect SAT score or the successful removal of my gall bladder at home by me, then I just don't know what to type."

Here's what I know about that.

You shouldn't post anything that includes words 'scary', 'spooky', 'haunted', 'forbidden' or 'hydroponic'. (Bonus points if you can guess that movie reference.)

Basically, just keep right on posting as if you'd never heard the term facebragging and I'll keep on blocking you.

It's either that or I'll be forced to copy your status word for word and post it as my own, tagging you in it.

My status today: I'm so proud of myself for ridding the world completely of facebragging. It's hard to be as awesome as me.