Our life with Hemingway

Yes, that is Ernest Hemingway I am referring to. And the above picture is him in his younger years (obviously). So, you are probably wondering what any of this has to do with our lives, right? For any of you who know Alex well, you can probably already guess. Alex is a story teller. Very creative, wordy and will give you every detail in a story multiple times. Pretty sure he didn't get this from his dad as Chris is a "cut to the chase" kind of guy and sometimes listening to Alex's long winded stories baffles him. I personally love it, it makes me chuckle at the things he notices and the things he adds to embellish his tales. To demonstrate this, I would like to treat all of you blog readers to an Alex story.  You may first need a little background on this topic. Alex is addicted to hot lunch. I mean, seriously addicted, it is like a drug to him. He was previously allowed to take hot lunch one day/week. This went well for awhile until he decided he was just going to take it every single day. No matter what we take away, what punishment we give him, it  doesn't matter. He takes hot lunch everyday anyways. Of course, we are still sending cold lunch everyday, which he is apparently eating for snack. The way the school system is set up, they cannot refuse hot lunch to the elementary kids so even if you take all the money out of their account (which I have done) they will just bill you for it. Currently we are spending about $15 a week on hot lunch plus making 5 cold lunches. Yes, we are insane, we openly admit this. It is a daily battle for our poor little addict. So, now you have the background on this topic.  I will now set the scene for this story......

Alex comes home from school, proudly announcing that he got a red star today (which means he didn't need any reminders and no time outs were needed- it's a good thing). Great, we said, we are really proud of you. I didn't even bring up hot lunch, I didn't want to know. He was good and only took it 4 days last week so I was blindly hopeful we were improving. Then, this story poured out of dear Hemingway Jr....(as best I can recreate the details)

"So, this is what happened. Well, first my friend, ya know Noah from the other class, not the Noah in my class, right. Ok. He was just walking along minding his own business and he fell, fell right into the sewer thing. Ya know the thing that has all of the horizontal bars on it, yeah, he got his arm stuck, right? Ok well, then my other friend was trying to pull him out of there and then, yep, he broke his arm. Broke it. So, I had to use my hot lunch code so he could eat"

Stop the story---- "Alex- you better not have had hot lunch today."

"Mom- you are not listening. His arm was BROKEN, I mean seriously broken, he couldn't carry his food tray and he didn't want to give me his lunch number. Well, actually I didn't want him to give it to me because I might remember it and then start eating lunch on his account (yes- God forbid some other poor family has to bear the brunt of Alex and his lunch addiction)- so I had to get him food, right, I mean he was starving and his arm was broken. He couldn't carry the food tray no way, the arm was bent ya know."

"Alex- you better not have given away your lunch code. (as a background to this, this has happened before and we have had to have his PIN number changed once already)"

"Of course I didn't. I just got in the lunch line, right in the line like I was going to have hot lunch, but then I used my code so my friend with the broken arm could eat".

"Alex, you better not have eaten hot lunch. If he needs lunch, he can just go through the line and they will give him lunch, do NOT start buying hot lunch for all your friends!!" At this point, I was losing patience and wondering what the real truth was so I started dialing the phone. "MOM- who are you calling." "Your teacher to find out what happened today"....

Then, poor Ernest had a look of panic.....

And then..."Wait, no wait mom, I promise I will tell you the truth. I really wanted hot lunch today"

"So....nobody broke their arm?"

"No"

"And you didn't buy anyone else lunch, right"

"No, just me. But did you like my story?"

Ahhh.....I wonder if Hemingway's parents had similar stories to tell. After all, someone as creative as the man who wrote "The Old Man and the Sea" must have had an interesting childhood. Of course, I wouldn't want to make too many comparisons beyond the stories as the life of Hemingway was quite tragic (so don't read too much into this). We have always said you can believe about 10% of what Alex tells you. It is just that sometimes it is hard to figure out which 90% is the part you should ignore......