#356
**Updated at bottom**
After school one day…
Me: Hey mister. I need to talk to you.
Rockstar: Yeah, what?
Me: One of your friends’ mums just messaged me. She dropped by school today and saw a (toddler-sized, because they’re actually the Miss’) box of chocolate milk in your friend’s hand. Was that from you?
Rockstar: Yup. (Our helper) pops them in my bag.
Me: Ok, firstly you and your sis both know you’re not supposed to feed other people’s children without asking. Secondly, I never told (our helper) to give you those (he rarely drinks milk that isn’t ice-cold – he gets his dairy from cheese) and I didn’t know she’s been putting them in after I supervise your lunch box. Why didn’t you just tell her you don’t drink them, have you been giving them away for a long time?
Rockstar: I trade them for snacks.
Me: You…. what?
Rockstar: It’s only for fruit. Some people really don’t like their fruit. So I eat their fruit for them and they get my milk.
Me: <spluttering> Firstly, not a few of my mum friends consider chocolate milk to be JUNK. We have mum friends who buy nothing that has more than three “E-something” additives in the ingredients lists (the additives can cause mood swings that obviously make your child more likely to behave badly). Secondly, I don’t think they are going to appreciate that their kids have been disposing of their fruit instead of eating it, via my Bottomless Pit Of A Fruit Vacuum Cleaner Child.
Me: Who’ve you been trading with??? And how are you guys even getting away with it, I seem to remember you’re not allowed to share food during your mealtimes. (Because of allergy precautions. Rockstar has friends who have serious nut allergies and we get emails now and again reminding us never to pack nut products. On top of that, they enforce a No Sharing rule, far as I know. Also an If You Touch It (during parties etc), It Goes On Your Plate rule…)
Rockstar rattles off 4 – 5 names.
Me: NONE of those kids are even in your class! And – and – who is (kid’s name), I’ve never even heard of him, and I know all your friends.
Rockstar: Y-eah I don’t know him either. He just came by to trade me his fruit one day. He doesn’t like oranges. Oh wait, I think he’s (one of his friend)’s friend.
Me: ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME!!!
Rockstar: What? I like fruit. I don’t like chocolate milk. But lots of my friends like it, it makes them very happy when I give it away.
Me: How much of your friends’ fruit have you been eating???
Rockstar: <shrugs> Whatever they trade when we’re on the playground. <reassuringly> It’s always just apples or oranges. (Rockstar has no food allergies – touch wood – which I assume makes him not on the closely-watched-re-anything-going-in-his-mouth list, and has been known to eat more exotic fruit on occasion – mangosteen, langsat, dragon fruit, peaches, persimmon, plums, the occasional jack fruit or durian, peaches (loves), nectarine (doesn’t – and I still can barely tell the difference) and even salak (snake fruit – but he had a particularly sour one so now he thinks they’re all super sour) I only trade for fruit. Oh, one time it was a whole full snack box of it. Like, they gave me all their fruit. Seriously. All.
Me: And you ate it? All of it?!
Rockstar: Yeah. I think so.
Me: HOW much time do you have to run your Fruit Finishing Public Service?! And what, you just hoover up all the fruit your friends don’t eat? Why didn’t you just say you wanted fruit also, in your lunch box???
(He already eats a huge bowl of fruit at night after his massive dinner and I’m paranoid about it going bad if not packed in a cool box – the cool box then makes his bag that much heavier… And anyway sometimes he eats so much fruit after dinner we limit the more high-water-content ones like watermelon, because otherwise he’s crashing about repeatedly out of bed to the bathroom in the night, stomping with his big clunky crocs and rattling the bathroom door – and then it’s like sharing the apartment with a bear.)
Rockstar: I always forget. Maybe because I already get fruit.
Updated on 7 Feb 2015: Rockstar made the call not to be an “enabler” – he says no more chocolate milk for his friends now he knows it’s really not good for them. Won’t they be unhappy with him? “They’ll be ok. I mean, what if one day I look at them and realise they got fat because I kept giving them my chocolate milk?”
He also wants fruit in his own lunch box, though he thinks friends are still going to ask him to help them eat some of theirs as well… “Even when I don’t give them milk sometimes they just don’t like their fruit…”
Fruit Hoover in Space Panda shirt having his hearing checked at regular checkup recently
I was smiling all the way when reading this. Rockstar is such a fruit vacuum cleaner – hahaha, you got it spot on. So now, no more milk chocolate so Rockstar has to close shop for his fruit trading business. I guess his friends would be so sad, they will need to eat their own fruits now.
Well… It appears not to be the same child every time and it IS a small box – less than half the size of the normal ones… Re Rockstar’s friend’s mum, I initially offered to stop sending them in but she said it was ok, she’d just get some for her own boy once a week… When I talked to Rockstar more, it appears the same child rarely gets the little box of milk repeatedly, they appear to be negotiating taking turns about who gets it each day… Somewhere at the back of my mind is some kind of social learning process those kids seem to b having so unless the school has a problem with it (in which case that milk is gone) I’ll just leave it..
Aileen, there are so many worse things to discover about your child than that he’s a fruit vacuum cleaner… and I’m sure you know that. 🙂
Haha well you’re definitely right about the “bigger picture”… My first worry was how “clean” some of that fruit was because I don’t know if he eats any leftovers left til the end of the day, whether his friends handle the fruit a lot with their hands etc… But it also appears he’s been “vacuuming” for awhile without anything happening to him 😀 Also, he’s a small child and we try to carb him up a lot – so I worried he eats too much fruit at the expense of other stuff… But really it’s a “happier” problem to have, that he isn’t vacuuming something worse, and I much prefer he has some happy social interaction with friends. (Also, he doesn’t appear to have given the milk to anyone whose mum REALLY hates it (touch wood))