Yesterday I was in a big meeting at Gluten-Free Living HQ and I received the familiar “ba-dink” from my Blackberry alerting me that I had a new text message. The only person who texts me in the middle of the day is my high school senior from whatever class she’s in and that’s a different problem altogether. Kids these days don’t ever pay attention to one thing at a time.
But, it was the lunch hour and since she has nine scheduled periods, she eats lunch in chorus so I apologized to Ann Whelan and looked at the text.
“I think you gave me the wrong sandwich.”
“Oh crap…” I texted back. Hardly a politically correct or maternal tone, but what she really was saying is that she got the turkey sandwich with the gluten-free bread and my celiac got the turkey sandwich on the loaded-with-gluten bread.
Two minutes later and there is another “ba-dink.” My other daughter happens to be in chorus as well and since both are Altos, they sit next to each other.
“Rach thinks its GF bread too.”
Now at this point, I’m wondering if I packed my celiac the Wheat Thins or the Pirate Booty and gluten-free chocolate chip cookies. Did I switch up the entire lunch or just the sandwiches? I confirmed that my daughter had the Wheat Thins so at least my celiac had something to eat in his lunch.
I assumed he was smart enough to look at the sandwich and deduce that he had whole wheat bread there. But, when you are hungry, you tend to make rationalizations. I was really ticked off at myself because that’s just a really dumb error.
When my daughter walked in, I asked her if she ate the sandwich and she did. She said that it tasted pretty good and that it took her a while to decide if it was GF or not. I typically buy whole wheat bread for the rest of them, so the fact that it looked more like white bread tipped her off.
When my celiac walked in from school he was grouchy, not because he felt sick but because he was hungry! He did not eat the sandwich, took it out of his back pack and asked me what to do with it. He didn’t even eat the turkey from the bread.
I said chuck the sandwich and I’ll fix you a nice big, GF bagel with cream cheese. What a relief, I’ll take a grouchy, hungry celiac over a kid who made the wrong decision any day. And to Ann Whelan, who puts up with these interruptions during meetings…thank you.
