I've got the solution to America's obesity problem right here.

Andrew came home from school earlier than he had planned to today, kind of surprising me. I was just about to take a nap since Rachel had just gone down for one. He said he'd join me because he's feeling sick, too, now. What he doesn't realize is that him being sick is against the rules. He's not allowed to get sick.

Rachel woke up at around 3:00 PM and since Andrew hadn't seen her since 9:00 AM yesterday I poked him awake and firmly suggested that he go spend some one-on-one time with our daughter while I spent some more one-on-one time with our nap. Clearly both Rachel and nap time have been feeling a little neglected lately and I thought it only fair that we divide our parental attentions accordingly.

After much poking and prodding he finally surrendered his will to the cause and got out of bed. I stayed in bed but I didn't fall back asleep. Instead I started thinking about what to make for dinner. When I made my list for the week (yes, I'm back to making lists, but only for the week since going shopping for the whole month here is impossible; the fresh food rots too fast) I wasn't sick, at least not very sick, so I thought that I would have more energy than I actually had this week. I've ignored my list and focused on easy dinners that don't really require much cooking.

This means that I have a lot of produce to use up in the next few days, which is fine, except that I still feel not very energetic and chopping vegetables doesn't sound appealing. I have potatoes to use but I don't really liked baked potatoes which means that I have to chop them up somehow and that sounds like a lot of work to me.

Since I was technically still having nap time I took a little while to daydream and entered the land of "What Ifs."

You know how grocery stores, even here, have a deli counter where you order your meat or cheese and they say, "Sliced or shaved?" (I like mine shaved, personally, so I usually say, "Shaved, please.")...And then they put it in/on that cool meat-cutting (or cheese-cutting) machine and 10 seconds later you have neat little pieces of thinly sliced lunch meat?

That is totally awesome because then you don't have to spend the time slicing your own lunch meat. It's so much faster than using left-over Thanksgiving turkey in your lunch because it's basically pre-prepared, yet still fresh.

Well, what if they had some cool machines like that in the produce department?

Then you could pick out your kilo of potatoes for dinner, walk up to the slicer-guys and say, "I'd like these cubed, please." And then they'd do it in like 10 seconds in their cool dicing machine.

Or if you wanted your carrots sliced Julienne-style you'd just take it up to the slicer-guys and say so and 10 seconds later they'd hand you a package of Julienned carrots.

Do you know how much time that would save? Tons. And I think it would motivate people to eat more healthy meals. So much so, in fact, that I probably just solved America's obesity problem.

There are some downsides, like having to go shopping more often because sliced produce goes bad faster than non-sliced produce. Of course, you face that same dilemma with meat and cheese, right?

Also, Egypt has juice stands in some of their grocery stores where you buy oranges (and grapes now, too) specifically to have them squished into orange juice (or grape juice, respectively). America needs to get the memo on that one because I'm sure going to miss fresh juice when we get back...in like a year and a half.