The Day We Found the Sandwich

So last month, Brooke discovered an alternative to finishing her food, particularly during lunch and/or dinner.  She has always been a good eater, but lately it seems that it has been more entertaining for her to stash her food somewhere rather than to just eat it. 

It started out subtle, with a little bit of food under her chair.  Then I started finding slices of lunch meat that appeared to come from the underneath a bookshelf near the kitchen table.  I say "appeared” because I didn’t see them at their point of origin.  I saw them in Emily’s hand, with her ready to use them as a jerky treat. Barf.  Then it evolved and one Saturday, I discovered that the turkey sandwich she requested for lunch had been carefully placed under a napkin below the drapes that cover the sliding glass door (the napkin pile was in plain sight mind you).  

Nothing we said seemed to matter, including the part that Emily would die from finding and eating so much disgusting food on the floor.  So we had to pull out all the stops and hit her where it would hurt… that meant no dessert for her for two whole weeks.  Brooke lives for dessert, so she was really unhappy about her sentence and turned things right around.  In fact, she was doing so well, we almost lessened her sentence halfway through.  But during the same meal that she tried to plead her case, she decided to stash a piece of cheese (which she loves) underneath her plate with us right there. 

So the original sentence held and she wasn’t happy about it but definitely understood why we showed no mercy.  Fast forward a few more days… things were going well and then I started dusting the living room.  I moved a picture frame only to discover something much worse than the dust I expected.  I found a VERY VERY VERY old turkey (I think it was turkey anyway) sandwich.  It was so old that I knew it was prior to her original sentence, so I wasn’t mad, just disgusted that I don’t dust more often and SOOOOOO glad that I decided to before the piano tuner came that afternoon.  The good news is that it was so old that it didn’t even stink anymore.  

Once I quit laughing and throwing up in my mouth, I made her come and clean in up.  She had a friend over (an older friend nonetheless), so she was NOT pleased and very embarrassed.  I am hopeful now that when she finishes doing her “time” this Saturday that one of two things will have happened.  Either one, that she has learned not to stash her food, because we always find it (eventually), or two, to just put it in the garbage can underneath something and we’ll never know.