While your child may be focused on the First Day Of School Outfit, as a mom you may be thinking of What To Pack For A School Lunch. I don’t know about you, but my daughter came home from school last year more often than not with barely half of her lunch eaten (that I made and packed for her that morning). At first I was perplexed; how could she get through the school day with barely eating anything? Then about halfway through the school year I wised up and thought of lunch as more of a big honking snack and fed her more of a lunch when she got home from school. This plan of attacked worked pretty well for our family.
As my daughter enters 3rd grade I don’t consider myself a lunch expert, but I try my best to abide by the following very basic principles:
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No child will starve him/herself
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It’s my job to provide and offer healthy foods
It’s my child’s job to eat them
That’s it. Very basic. I don’t play food games, I am not a short order cook (anymore, as of 4 years ago).
I use 2 strategies to make the above mentioned principles work as best as possible for our family:
1. Make packed lunches as visually appealing and fun as possible
2. Have healthy snacks out on the table after school/before dinner
To make food visually appealing, I check in every now and then with a terrific website, www.meethedubiens.com because Jill Dubien, mom of 2, seriously has the easiest, cutest and funnest (that totally counts as a word when you have at least 1 preschooler in your house) snack and lunch ideas and recipes on the planet. She is big into making food look fun and uses bento boxes a lot. Even the most complicated looking bento box isn’t with her how-to’s and supply list. http://www.meetthedubiens.com/category/bento-boxes.
So last year in September I purchased a stainless steel bento box, food design cutters and some cute animal-themed food picks. The only expensive item was the stainless steel bento box at $16.00. I did use it a lot. My ultimate goal was to make the Perry the Platypus sandwiches but I just never really got there. This year, it’s one of my goals to actually make them. But even just packing bite sized food with the animal picks made her lunch more special and fun.
The Perry sandwich can be found here: http://susanyuen.wordpress.com/page/3/. It’s under the August 2, 2011 entry.
For those frantic weekday mornings Jill Dubien has a printable PDF list to stick on your fridge for fast and healthy foods to pack for school lunches. I still have it on mine from last September. It’s been a great help; I would never have thought of mini pancakes as something to put in a lunch or waffle sandwiches. These two items were always eaten!
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B9-LTQ6QE9FgRTR3SmhHbXdXLTg/edit
Tomorrow, I’ll blog about my strategies for having healthy food available for my kids after school.