Leaving a note in your child's school lunchbox can be a cute way of brightening up their day with a funny or sweet message.
However, when mums and dads are mired in the chaos of family life, they're not always in the mood to craft thoughtful, loving missives for their beloved offspring.
Instead of calmly sitting down at the table to pen a heartfelt reminder that their kids are loved like a model 1950s housewife, often the best that the put-upon modern parent can manage is a line of hastily scrawled biro on a napkin.
On days like those, the kids end up with notes like the hilarious lunchbox messages we've collected below.
They range from the irate ('Eat your food!'), to the sarcastic ('I have left the crusts on. Today is the first day of the rest of your life'), to the startlingly frank ('I was too tired to cut apple slices this morning').
These funny notes from parents to kids will be painfully familiar to anyone who's ever walked into the kitchen on a weekday morning and thought: "God, not another lunchbox!"
Hat tip to NickMom who started us off with some of these...
1. The ultimatum
2. The brutally honest
3. The optimist
4. The depressingly frank
5. The last resort
6. The eternally hopeful
7. The end of the tether
8. The drippingly sarcastic
9. The trying-not-to-be-embarrassing
10. The no-nonsense
11. The weary nutritionist
12. The little cynic
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