The chiropractor’s waiting room has six chairs, a fish tank nobody looks at, and — this is the part that surprised me — more parents with kids in tow than I expected. Youth sport clinics apparently send a steady stream of eleven-year-olds with sore backpacks and worse posture.
What the other parents pack
I people-watch while we wait. One dad hands his daughter a juice box and a foil packet of something orange and crumbly. Another mum has a tub of grapes that have clearly been sweating in a warm car for an hour. My own kid gets a small bag of dates, which sounds like a small thing to notice, but fifteen minutes in a waiting room gives you time to notice small things.
Dates don’t need to stay cold, they don’t leak, and they don’t turn to mush if the appointment runs late — which, this being a chiropractor’s office on a Tuesday afternoon, it usually does.
Why we’re here at all
Nothing dramatic — a screening after a growth spurt, on the coach’s suggestion, the same way you’d get a mouth guard fitted or shoes checked for size. It isn’t treatment for anything; it’s one more box on the list of things worth checking while he’s still growing.
The healthy-eating half of the visit happens in the car after, when he asks what’s for dinner and I ask what he actually ate at school. That conversation goes better with a snack in hand than an empty stomach, which is most of the reason the dates are in the bag in the first place.
The bag itself
Nothing fancy — I buy a batch from the Dates Fruit range, keep a scoop of it in a lidded tub in the car door, and top it up from the healthy food selection whenever we’re near empty. If you’re building a similar stash, Contact Us is the quickest way to ask what’s in stock this week.