When we go back to our parents’ house, we have to be a little careful. That is, our parents are old enough to welcome us home.
We don’t want to open the front door and say, “I’m home,” like we used to, and then ask, “I’m hungry! What’s for dinner tonight? “
Parents have a much harder time accepting you than you think. We want to make sure that they are not burdened as much as possible.
Therefore, we try to save energy in various ways, such as eating a packed lunch during our stay, and making and cleaning the futon completely by ourselves.
Once, during a trip home, we all ate bento boxes that we had bought at the supermarket.
The bento box prepared for Takeh, my son, was larger than what an adult would eat. The reason was that it was served in a blue car-shaped container. Ah, it was a kid’s lunch!
This is the first time I’ve seen a lunch box sold in such a child-friendly container.
Are there always such fun bento boxes for sale? I asked my mother-in-law, and she replied, “I don’t usually see this kind of bento box in the store, but today was the first time I saw it for sale, so I bought it.
I wondered why. I wondered and thought about it, and then I remembered that today was Children’s Day (a national holiday in Japan).
Oh, that’s right, special bento boxes for children are sold on Children’s Day.
There was no way that Takeh would not be happy to see this bento box. In fact, he is more pleased with the container than the contents of the lunch box.
However, he may not understand that it is a car. If anything, he seems to be more pleased with the sense of superiority that he is in a special box, different from those of other adults.
This is just my guess, but to him a car is something that has wheels and rolls when you push it.
Like that lunch box, if it looks like a car but has no wheels and does not roll when you push it, he cannot recognize it as a car, or he does not want to play with it even if he can recognize it.
I was quite happy about that. If he had started playing with the car-shaped lunch box instead of eating, his parents would have had to warn him that he was misbehaving.
(2023.05.05)
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