Seussical Lunches and Prose

March 2nd is Theodore Geissel's...aka Dr Seuss...birthday. For years, the school's have been coordinating this day with their reading programs and community volunteers that come in and read to the kids.

The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, and Horton Hears a Who are favorites that are read, and reread for the whimsical celebration of the layman's poetry. The significance of having guests in to the kids' classrooms: "You are never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child."

And since I can't be there to read today...I wanted to send some of Seuss-inspired motherly advice in their lunches. I'm not much of a breakfast fan, so I decided to take our family celebration to the lunch special instead. The kids are enjoying my version of green eggs and ham, with deviled eggs (dyed green, of course) and ham slices for lunch. I skewered Babybel cheese between white donuts to create the "hat". And I added the fish crackers to follow the One Fish, Two Fish book.

I printed out my favorite Seuss quote and taped it to the top of their lunch boxes. To complete the meal, I created a Thing 1 label to wrap around a water bottle and taped a packet of single-serving Kool-Aid to the side.

The bows held it all together and I put them out in the garage fridge. Everyone wanted to know if they were supposed to buy today because their lunch bags were empty. I went and pulled these out--and they got excited. That made it worth the effort to make deviled eggs at 1am....

But there are some great messages and truisms in the beloved Seuss works. The rhyming prose is brilliant, funny, and really articulates itself to a child's understanding. I think that Theodore Geissel was a gifted and talented human being, and his birthday is well-worth celebrating in a day of mock super heroes and false idols. And unlike those temporary icons in the media...there's a powerful message about being and accepting your own individual worth. Some of my favorites are:

"You have BRAINS in your HEAD. You have FEET in your SHOES. You can STEER yourself any DIRECTION you CHOOSE."

"Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened."

And this was the one I taped to their lunch: