The other day I was re-organizing my sock drawer.  (Yes, I was that bored. Plus I couldn’t find any paired socks.)  “Oh, look what I found!” I exclaimed to my husband.

“What?”

“A box of chocolate chip cookies I hid.  I completely forgot about them.  I wonder if they’re still any good.”

He shrugged.  “Only one way to find out.”  He opened the box and helped himself to a cookie.  “Kind of stale.”

“Drat!  I hate it when I hide food and forget about it,” I muttered.

“Me, too,” he agreed.

You may wonder why we have food hidden in odd places in our house.  It’s simple.  We have a thirteen year old son who does not exercise restraint when it comes to junk food.  If I buy a box of cookies at the store on Monday, it will be completely depleted by Tuesday, without my husband or I having had the first one.  A package of family-sized chips will, likewise, be polished off in one sitting.  A bottle of juice will be consumed in a few hours, although he always leaves a teaspoon full in the bottom so we can’t say he drank it all. He is also quite clever in that he leaves the empty packages on the shelf so we won’t realize the items are gone.  This makes it even more aggravating when we go to have a snack and discover an empty package full of crumbs.  Things we buy to pack in his school lunches are gone within a day or two, leaving us with nothing to send except peanut butter sandwiches, which always come home uneaten.

The only alternative was to start hiding food which we actually wanted to last until the next trip to the grocery store.  We have bottles of juice and individual bottles of Gatorade in our bedroom closet hidden underneath my pants, which hang on a lower rack.  A large box of Goldfish is in there, too.  Cookies, chips, candy, and crackers end up in our night table drawers, desk drawers, sweater closet, and filing cabinet.  Unfortunately, Darion, the bottomless pit, has become quite the sleuth in sniffing out where snack items are hidden.  There are no hiding places left which he hasn’t discovered.  We have resorted to banning him from our bedroom, which works only as long as we are in the room monitoring it.   However, it is really difficult to hide frozen foods like ice-cream and Hot Pockets.

One shining light in this aggravating situation is that Darion is extremely picky, so if we find something  we like which he doesn’t, it can actually be stored on a pantry shelf with no fear of it disappearing.  Oatmeal raison cookies—not a problem.  Pretzels and nuts will remain undisturbed.  Cereal is in no danger.  Even Moon Pies are safe.

You may be itching to point out the obvious answer to our dilemma—which would be to stop buying any junk food, period.  While I agree this solution would work in theory, I’m not prepared to go to that extreme.  😊