Health & Fitness
Passing the Buck on After School Oreos
Everyday, families are confronted with terribly difficult choices: what to give their child in an after-school snack. I chose M&Ms for ten years. Once again, with a toddler, my outlook is different.
After I go to pick the toddler up at daycare at about 5:15 every evening, after the hug and kiss my fiancée and I hear the same line.
“I want an Oreo when we get home!”
My fiancée and I do what every family across the country does when asked a question we don’t want to answer: we tell Luke to ask the other one if he can have it. Hey, passing the responsibility of a child asking “can I have….” is a time-tested tradition that has withstood the test of time.
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After Luke gets bounced around between my fiancée and myself a few times, looking to see if he can have the Oreo, we hope he forgets what he wanted (kind of like when a toddler asks if he can play with a toy, and by the time you open it he lost interest). However, as we know, Oreo’s are never quickly forgotten.
After schools snacks, especially those that are “less than healthy” have been near and dear to my heart for decades. Growing up, I would come home every day from school and have my after school snack.
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It was a bowl full of M&Ms (well, not full, but I always made sure I had two layers of M&Ms in the bowl). To this day, I still eat them M&Ms the exact same way: two
M&Ms stacked on top of each other switching from one side of my mouth to
the other, and if there’s an odd number of the candy, I split it down the middle with my front teeth and each side gets a half.
So where am I going with this? My M&M eating habits have been set since I was about 8 years old. Over 20 years I’ve been eating them the same way! That’s kind of impressive I think. Are M&Ms the most healthy after school snack? No. Should my fiancée and I give a toddler an Oreo at 5:15 every night, right before dinner? No. There’s a balance in everything in life, and in my next blog post, I will discuss the options families have in after school snacks to make the parents and kids happy.
Matt Elder owns and operates i9 Sports, a youth sports league in Marlborough. Their flag football and cheerleading program is taking registrations for its spring season, and plays every Sunday afternoon, where they have a practice and a game all in the same day. No weekday practices. Visit www.i9sports.com today for more details.
