At 11:07 on the first Thursday of the Easter holidays I came downstairs for the kettle and found Alfie in front of the open fridge with a fork and the tub of grated cheese. It was the cheese for lunch. Lunch was at half past twelve. The tub was about a third full.
"I was only checking," he said.
I work from home on Thursdays, so I'm the one who finds these things. The school holidays turn our lunch arrangements upside down, and I have spent the last week trying to turn them back.
Double the children, double the appetite
In term time, lunch is nearly invisible. Isla takes a packed lunch that costs us about £1.31, and Alfie has a free infant school dinner, so he costs us nothing at all. In the holidays both of them eat at home, which doubles the number of lunches. And each of them seems to eat roughly twice as much at the kitchen table as they do in a lunchbox, which doubles it again. I've always said that holidays double our lunch bill. I should have said quadruple.
Linda and Steve had the kids on Monday and Tuesday of the first week while I was at the office, and Linda fed them cheese on toast and something she calls "a bit of tea". So the first week only had three home lunches to count, Wednesday to Friday. Even so.
The lunch shelf
The fix this week is a labelled shelf. It's the second shelf down in the fridge, with a strip of masking tape across the front that says LUNCH in Isla's handwriting. Each evening, I fill it with the next day's lunches, already portioned: cheese in two pots, cucumber and carrot sticks in a tub, grapes, two yoghurts, a bag of ham. The rule is that the shelf is for lunch and nothing else, and if you raid it at 11 you have less lunch at 12:30. That rule is not popular, and it has been tested once.
The shelf wasn't enough on its own, because a boy who wants a snack at 11 will find one. So there's also a snack tub on the counter, which is always allowed: apples, a cheese string, a few crackers and the end of the bananas. It was Isla's idea. She said, "If they can have it anytime, nobody will steal the lunch," which is the sort of thing she says and which turns out to be correct.
The plan, and what it cost
The rough plan for the fortnight is on the fridge whiteboard, not set in stone:
- Cheese toasties with cucumber sticks and apple
- Pitta pockets with hummus, carrot and grapes
- Rolls from the Lidl bakery, ham and tomatoes on the plate
- Pasta salad made from the night before's pasta, with sweetcorn and a spoon of mayonnaise
- Soup and bread, or beans on toast with grated cheese
The first week's three lunches at home cost £15.90. Wednesday's toasties came to £5.10, Thursday's pitta pockets £5.45 (the hummus was the extravagance) and Friday's Lidl rolls £5.35. That's £5.30 a day for two children, or £2.65 each, against £1.31 for Isla's lunchbox in term and nothing at all for Alfie. So the day's bill has gone from £1.31 to £5.30, which is a little over four times. I was budgeting for double. The Easter month is going to come in over my usual £105 a week, and I've decided to count that as fair, not a failure.
The honest part: the shelf worked on Wednesday, and by Thursday it had a hole in it. I've moved the grated cheese to the back and put the cucumber at the front, where a seven-minute raid does less damage. The hummus is still going.
Today is Tuesday and the second week has started. I'm at the office, and Linda and Steve have the kids again. Linda's report by text, at ten to eleven, was that Alfie had inspected her fridge and seemed disappointed there was no labelled shelf. She says she told him one would be installed by Easter. It is nearly Easter, so I'm going to need some masking tape.
