Tired and Hungry
This “not eating between meals” lark is hardespecially when you live in a house filled with daughters who seem to subsist on nothing but snacks. I just walked into town to fetch our youngest from her modern dance class, and the first words to leave her mouth upon meeting me in the hallway outside the gym were entirely predictable”I'm hungry”.
Before you think “ooohlah de dahhis children go to dance classes”, I'll smash that preconception on the head straight away. Our youngest daughter has had various development delays since she was tiny. We have no idea what happened in her early life (she's adopted), so we've just done our best over the years to help her both academically and physically in whichever ways we could. At school she has always been flanked by special educational needs assistants, and away from school she has always taken part in all manner of sports and activities. It just so happens that one of our friends in town is a professional fitness and dance instructor. One thing lead to another, and now she plays for two football teams, and attends two different dance classes.
She can run like the wind blows.
Obviously taking part in so many activities requires quite a bit of fuel to power her 10 year oldbody (which is all muscle, elbows, and coltish clumsiness at the moment)and that results in continual claims of “I'm hungry”. It just so happens we buy vast quantities of fruit at home, so when the children start asking for food, our reflex response is almost always “you can have some fruit”. Notice I say “almost always”. That's why they keep askingin the hope that they might get something else.
I guess we're lucky in many ways that the kids will happily eat fruit. Because we have a vegetarian, and a coeliac in the house, we have always eaten a lot of home cooked foodwhich perhaps explains their willingness to eat what they are given (except of course Miss Eleven, who would probably fall off her bike if she heard an ice cream van, and run after it with bloody knees).
So yeah. The kids run here, there, and everywhere, and continually pick at snacks to refuel. Meanwhile I'm “being good”, and not eating anything in-between meals. And it sucks.