Hahaha, as soon I could handle a butter knife, sandwich making went to me. I am not sure my Mom actually ever packed me a lunch for a field trip at any age.... (I ate in the cafeteria in school though, so didn't need to pack a lunch on a regular basis either).
My Mom is awesome, but she is definitely not the coddle and cuddle type. She is the shut up and stop your complaining type and you better learn quick how to do your own laundry and clean up and make your own lunches...
My mother was not a coddler, either. I had other household tasks, and she didn't like to let us in the kitchen because we never seemed to clean up after ourselves sufficiently.* And, my mother, well, could not really cook. She could do baked goods like nobody's business, but the woman could not cook anything but a very basic meal. We didn't starve, but it usually was only marginally edible. And incredibly bland.
She was also a sort of proto-health-food nut who insisted we eat a kind of whole grain bread that she bought that you could have shingled a roof with. It was truly just awful to have a slice of meat on two slices of that stuff in my lunchbox. I used to eat the meat and throw the bread to the pigeons, and often they didn't want it, either. She could, however, boil things**. Like Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup. Or hot dogs. Some days my thermos would be full of hot soup, or boiling water and a hot dog. There'd be a hot dog bun and a small packet of ketchup in the lunchbox. I was the envy of the other kids and traded that hot dog for some gooood stuff (like Ho-hos or PBJ on Wonderbread), when I was a kid.
----------
* The ban did not go so far as to excuse us from doing the dishes. Eventually we did have a dishwasher, but it cost money to run it so we still had to do the dishes by hand. (We could have afforded to run it, by then. But my father had been too frugal for too long by then. The dishwasher was bought when he was fixing up the house to sell it, or else we'd never have gotten one.)
** Boiling food. Hams had to be soaked, drained, soaked, drained, and then boiled. It had something to do with the kind of ham - I haven't seen one of those since I was a kid. Would love to, though. Excellently salty. Fresh corn-on-the-cob was boiled, and was good. And then there was Mom's Liver and Onions. Oh. Dear. God. You could smell it down the street when you got off the bus. She would put a chunk of liver in a big pot with onions and boil it until it bounced. Literally - I saw it bounce once when she dropped it getting it out of the pot. You had to kind of spear it on your plate so you could get it to hold still long enough to cut it. Or, rather, my father did. It was grey and nasty, and I wouldn't eat it, no matter what they did. [I finally was excused from eating it whenever she made it the time it was coerced by threats into my mouth and I barfed it back out immediately.]
