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Monday, January 26, 2009

Feed me

By DARREN HANDSCHUH

There was once a time in my humble home when there existed a thing called leftovers.
You know, those convenient and quick lunches that were composed of dinner from the night before.
They were a wonderful invention, and a handy time-saving accessory, but those days are no more.
Why are they gone you may ask. No, it is not because the economic downturn means we are buying less food, it means my home has teenagers.
I have two teenage sons roaming the homestead and most of the time that roaming is done in search of food.
“I’m hungry, what do we have to eat?”
“You’re hungry? We just had supper.”
“I know, but that was like 20 minutes ago.”
As if a 13 and 15 year old cannot go through the food fast enough on their own, there is always at least one add on, sometimes more, hanging out with plate in hand.
I don’t even bat an eye when there are two extra people at the dinner table, but I have to admit, as my kids and their friends get older, keeping them fed is becoming more of a challenge.
At this rate, I might have to refinance my home just to buy food for teens that can chomp their way through a full fridge like a horde of locusts through a prairie field.
And we are talking biblical hordes here, not the wimpy ones of the last 1,000 years or so.
When these guys start to eat it, is best to stay out of their way until they are finished. If you get between them and food, well, let’s just say I am making a full recovery and the teeth marks in my arm are barely noticeable.
Always having extra kids running around the house was fine by me. What did I care? It was a little louder that usual, but God has blessed me with the ability to tune out the sound waves that swirl around my home.
One of my favourite quotes of all time is, “You can ignore anything if you try hard enough.”
Sometimes I have to try a little harder than others, but generally I can tolerate the organized chaos that comes with being ‘the house.’
By ‘the house’ I mean we have become the house everyone hangs out at. One day I came home to find 12 kids milling about in our backyard, of which only one was mine.
They had found some cans of spray paint and decided to customize their shoes. Apparently solid gold shoes were all the rage, so several pairs of feet left looking like they had been touched by Midas.
Some of the shoes were really expensive too so I wondered what their parents thought when they got home.
It’s not the like the shoes were ruined, they were just personalized.
The noise is not a problem – most of the time anyway - but the food consumption is starting to be noticed.
Two days after spending roughly $87,000 on food, the pitiful wail of a young voice can be heard, “There’s nothing to eat.”
“What do you mean there’s nothing to eat? There was half a water buffalo in the fridge two days ago and enough cereal to stucco a house.”
Cookies have a shorter lifespan than a fruit fly and granola bars last only slightly longer.
We are starting to buy bigger and bigger boxes of food stuffs and pretty soon I will have to rent a flatbed truck to get it all home.
Perhaps we should buy a farm and then the kids could just graze through the garden. The cattle could go straight from the field to the barbecue.
But even then I do not know if the cows can reproduce fast enough to keep up with demand.
shoenews@shaw.ca

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