The case of the Cafeteria Bail-Out

Not only did I have the very good fortune of marrying a man with a built-in intuition for when to bring home a bar of dark chocolate, he's also a finance professor. This means our television is generally parked on strange channels with endless crawls on the bottom of the screen comprised of random letters and numbers in a strange code where SATC does not stand for "Sex and the City" and PPDI is not "Post Partum Depression, Intensified."

Because Dr. Brilliant had predicted a financial meltdown a long time ago, in addition to tightening household spending and working to reduce our debts, I recently started a full-time job outside the home. With our oldest son a mere three years from finishing high school, our longtime plan of him getting a full-ride scholarship somewhere (Anywhere! Not picky!) seems a bit more shaky and building up a little account to help with tuition payments as a back-up plan seemed prudent.

Every day during lunch hour, I race across town to start/dry/fold a load of laundry, get supper ready for one of the boys to pop in the oven later, and eat a sandwich feeling very thrifty and practical for not requiring outside assistance to maintain the house. Freddie and Fannie might be circling the drain, but we're okay!

So it was more than a little odd when my 1st grader handed me a note on the dreaded goldenrod paper. In this elementary school, a note on goldenrod from the office is the equivalent of those pink envelopes companies send after a bill is delinquent. I've forgotten the rainbow sequence of collection envelopes, but I used to know thanks to a college roommate who got them all the time. She actually told collection agents who called on her outstanding balances, "Look, I only have so much money every month to pay you guys, so I write your names on a piece of paper and put it a hat to decide. You're annoying me so much, I'm not even PUTTING YOU IN THE HAT THIS MONTH!"

According to the goldenrod statement, we had a significant negative balance on our son's lunch account, which was odd, as we'd loaded up the account just six weeks prior at the beginning of the school year. Looking more closely at the statement, the Mystery of the Missing Lunch Money was quickly solved.

Apparently someone had decided the Free/Reduced Price breakfasts the school makes available for kids who might otherwise go hungry looked way more appetizing than the selection of cereals we have at home. Only because that little someone didn't qualify for free or reduced food, Momma has been working to pay for someone's $3 Pop-Tart. Even better, during the time we've been the most fiscally responsible we've ever been, people walking their kids into school have been sadly shaking their heads that we're unable to feed our young.

In the end, because it was less than $700 billion, we decided to bail the little bugger out. But next time, he's on his own.