For spring break this year, we drove a couple of hours out of town, up into the mountains, where I proceeded to eat anything that wasn’t nailed down.

I think it was the brisk mountain air.

Normally, I don’t allow any junk food in the house. But on vacation, we bend the rules.

Vacation is the only time we get to buy sugary cereal, for instance.

(But no Pop-Tarts. We no longer get to eat those on vacation, after the year I discovered my son had eaten nothing but Pop-Tarts for the previous 48 hours.)

This year, I made a grocery list and sent my husband and son to the store.

They came back with a 1-pound box of Frosted Flakes.

We went through the two gallons of milk before we got through the Frosted Flakes.

We just ate dry Frosted Flakes straight out of the box.

I put a few healthy things on the shopping list. Apples. Grapes.

They forgot the grapes.

The boys also came back from the store with a can of Cheez-Ummms flavored Pringles. They bought them as a lark, and secretly placed bets on whether anyone would actually eat them.

The Pringles were pretty good, actually.

We went through two batches of Nestle Toll House cookies. I didn’t get to eat many of those, because the children swarmed downstairs and inhaled them as soon as they came out of the oven.

I learned my lesson. When we made the second batch, I made sure to help myself to several servings of cookie dough.

The kitchen was also stocked with two cartons of microwave popcorn (butter flavor) and two cartons of microwave popcorn (kettle corn flavor). (Are the packets of popcorn smaller than they used to be? I think they’re making them smaller.)

There was also frozen pizza and peanut butter and jelly for, like, meals and stuff.

We went through most of a bag of French vanilla coffee, because I kept falling into a sugar coma in the afternoons.

Mid-vacation, we took a trip into town, and stopped at the local farmers’ market. We didn’t buy any vegetables, because all they had were beets. But we did buy some flatbread pizza and half-a-dozen homemade coconut macaroons. We always try and support the local economy when we’re on vacation.

By the time dinnertime rolled around on our last day, I was forcing myself to eat the last of the ranch dip, because we forgot to bring a cooler, so we couldn’t take any of the refrigerated snacks home, and I hate to waste food.

I was having to eat the dip with the Cheez-Ummms Pringles, because I couldn’t find the tortilla chips. (I later found them upstairs in the kids’ room, along with what was left of the popcorn.)

That’s when I remembered there was a five-pound pan of lasagna in the freezer that we still needed to eat.