School dinners and all related....

So the girls have returned to school, and both are now in juniors, this means that I now have to pay for 2 lots of dinner money - £2.30 a day each...  £92 a month! That's equivalent to one weeks shopping for a family of four, with enough left for a bottle of wine!  But I know they both enjoy school dinners, and they are freshly cooked at the school which is something, and with us parents having to work, it gives me piece of mind that they've had a cooked meal in the day - which takes the pressure off in the evening.  Especially good also is the fact that on days that they have Brownies or swimming, they have a cooked meal at lunch, and I can give them a packed lunch to have at afterschool club, pick them up - off to clubs then home, bath, bed, sleep, repeat.

Packed lunches are another bug bare of mine - and no I'm not on the band wagon and having a go at unhealthy choices for kids lunch boxes, I mean the lack of facilities to store them properly at school.  I mean take the average ham sandwich - it has to survive being in a plastic lunch box, which is quite likely going to be on a trolley with the rest of the classes lunches - for the entire morning and the trolley is quite likely to be parked in the vicinity of a heater or radiator.... not a refrigerator in site!  I think this is something they do need to address - goodness knows what germs will be lurking on the ham sandwich come lunch time!

Innocent grapes??

They look like innocent grapes right? Wrong! I bit in to one and they have seeds! Seeds I tell you! I thought grapes with seeds had been banned or abolished or something, but no they leap out and surprise you when you least expect them to, I could've chipped a tooth! 

However all jokes aside, my two girls were amazed at the grapes with pips and couldn't wait to try them, I explained that all grapes were like this when I was little, but through farmers developing their strains of grapes we now have seedless - they seemed a little shocked :D