food

To the mum who writes on her daughter's bananas.

My daughter has always hated bananas. They are her least favourite fruit. She’ll eat anything else except for bananas and that’s just fine by me. As long as she eats some fruit I am happy.

When she came home last week and asked for bananas to be added to the fruit rotation for her school recess I should have been immediately suspicious. What was going on? Had my daughter been abducted by aliens and replaced with a clone? That’s how shocked I was at her banana request. That’s how thrown I was by her new-found love of bananas.

I demanded to know what was going on. Why did she suddenly love bananas so much after a lifetime of loathing them?

“Mum, Violet’s mum writes on her bananas,” she said to me the next morning as I shoved her banana into her brown bag with a packet of chips, while taking desperate sips of my morning coffee, while waiting for the iron to heat up, while yelling at my son to hurry up in the shower.

My daughter looks sweet and innocent but she's incredibly demanding. Image: Caterina, 6, provided
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"She writes on her bananas?!?" Clearly this was a joke.

"She writes Knock Knock jokes on them and sometimes she draws pictures on them. She writes that she loves her. She does it every day."

S**t s**t s**t s**t s**t.

To the mum who writes on her daughter's bananas,

Why have you decided to ruin my life? Because of your decision to not only feed your child at school but love them and amuse them too, you have now destroyed my mornings which were already teetering on the brink of total destruction due to the whole working-mother-of-three thing.

It's not like I can write on the bananas in advance! They get ripe quickly. That means not only do I have to select the bananas carefully, at their perfect state of ripeness, I now have to think of something to write on them.

You suck,

Jo

I wanted my daughter to understand how ridiculous it was for her to request that I write on her school bananas. "Mummy doesn't have time," I pleaded.

"But can't you just do it," she said.

So that day I wrote down:

WHY DO I HAVE TO WRITE ON THIS BANANA

My daughter was not amused.

Here are some invaluable lunch box hacks from Those Two Girls. Article continues after this video.

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"Mum, you are meant to write down a joke or how much you love me, not what you wrote today," she scolded me. Yep, that's my life since my daughter started school. I'm scolded regularly by a six-year-old.

The next day I wrote:

I LOVE YOU DARLING

I received the following feedback:

"Mum, you are meant to draw a happy face next to it when you say you love me and you are meant to say that it's from you too."

So this morning I wrote:

JUST EAT ME ALREADY

I know I'm going to cop it this afternoon when she gets home.

My son overheard the conversation and asked that I start writing on his bananas too but he's much easier to please. I said one thing that I thought was stupid that had him in fits of laughter and he wants me to write it on his banana every day.

It says:

DEAR GIOVANNI, I AM AN APPLE, LOVE BANANA

This is what I had to do this morning. Luckily my son is much easier to please. Image: Provided
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I have no idea why he thinks that's so funny.

The bottom line is that I am p**ed that I have to do this and I blame the mum who started this ridiculous thing for the fact I now have another thing to do each day, like I already didn't have enough to do. What next? Do I have to start cutting her sandwiches into stars and love hearts? Will I have to draw pictures on her brown bags?

Isn't it enough that I feed her?

It's just too frustrating for words.