originally published May 24, 2012

Boys are fun. One would assume that our grocery bill is getting lower, considering the people leaving home and all. But they are all girls. But we now have three boys at home between the ages of nine and almost fifteen who feel the need to consume their body weight in groceries daily.

 I wonder what families do that have seven boys or nine boys or some number of boys that would eat entire rooms of food.  I am pretty sure that those are the families that God has specially blessed to live in poverty.  So that they can get through the eye of a needle easier.  Probably because they will be so thin.

About feeding boys.  For years now I have had a policy that I don't feed people between meals.  They are allowed to eat between meals, its not a spoiling their appetite thing, its just that I don't have time to to be preparing snacks and meals all day long.  So I developed a policy a long time ago, when my big girls were small that I would keep a fruit bowl full all the time, and if they were hungry between meals, they could help themselves.  The main factor in this decision was that snacks could happen without my involvement.  Nutrition was the very next consideration.

Anyway, this splendid idea worked for a long time, in fact, until two or three years ago until my boys started getting big. Fruit was simply not enough.  Their poor little stomachs were starting to bulge out of starvation between hefty meals, and surely they were starting to show signs of rickets.

So, driven by the sheer boys forces of hunger, I had to develop some kind of snack system that was more filling and yet cleverly didn't involve me.  Cleverly, I set up a snack basket in my pantry cupboard which contained thing like granola bars, protein bars, trail mix, pepperoni sticks, beef jerky (which actually takes more calories to eat than it provides) and the like.  He-man protein food.

It works really well.  Except that there is a definite real time investment in making stuff for them.  My boys experience love in a very particular way when I make them food.

This expression of love directly increases in value according to how much work it took to make the food item.  This is why every man on the planet likes pie.

I guess I should make a pie today.