17 Highbrow Street

In our daily life, we only use cloth napkins.  The reason is that we are super fancy.  The ultimate goal is to become the couple who live on Highbrow Street in The Great Muppet Caper.*  Weeknight dinner are strictly black tie and we always have sorbet to cleanse our palates between our soup course and our…?

Yeah, actually we had soup every night last week, and not because Lent was starting.  We’ve just been eating an excessive amount of soup, and not necessarily decadent soup.  It’s a lot of the same vegetable soup repeated weekly.  The post-service “simple soup dinner” at church on Wednesday was about ten clicks above the lentil soup awaiting us on Thursday night.

But we do use cloth napkins because I *hate* buying things for the purpose of throwing them away.  It’s environmental, but also strongly driven by one of my most influential shopping trips.  I once went to Target and purchased diapers, wipes, toilet paper, and cat litter:  The bill was $100.  That’s the limit.  I don’t care if napkins are a thousand for a penny; I don’t want to dump one more penny in the garbage.

Back when school started I realized that I really needed to put napkins in lunches, but didn’t want to start buying napkins just so they could travel to the school trash can.  Kindergarten and preschool boys do not use napkins.  If they’re not going to use them anyway, they might as well be cloth napkins.

So I made lunchbox napkins.  I’ll admit, I did ponder over how weird that was.  But I quickly realized that if the boys had seen Captain America napkins in a store, they would have begged for them.  Put Captain America on anything and they will ask for it.  And really, sometimes you just have to stick your head up and say, this is how we do it in our family.

The only way one gets unfolded at school is if I wrap it around a cookie. 

Tate, with his glimmery-laughy-sneaky look, informed me that he never uses his napkin at school.  Of course not!  Wonderful!  Success!  I will use the money I would have spent on them not using napkins and use it to buy cheese or quail’s eggs.  Or more soup.

 

*Holy cow, watching that scene from The Muppet Movie makes me realize that Holly totally reminds me of Miss Piggy right now.  I’ll bet the Fabulous Baseball Diamond that she shimmies up a drainpipe by the time she’s two.