Now that my boys are back in school, each morning the lunch cube sits empty on my counter, waiting to be filled with healthy and delicious food.
Way before it was popular to post a million photos of your kid’s school lunch on the internet, I wrote a blog post about how we pack lunches in my house. While my ideas are still valid, in the two years since that post went up, Pinterest happened.
Now there are any number of sites and blog posts about school lunches. For example, you can find:
- Peanut-Free lunch ideas (from Echoes of Laughter)
- Non-Sandwich lunch ideas (from Craft Gossip)
- 30-Days of Lunch (Favorite 5)
Check out my School Lunch pinboard for the pins linked above as well as other lunch packing ideas. Who knew there were so many printable guides for lunch packing? Jokes, love notes, schedules……
I think we all get stuck in food ruts, and I think it’s useful to have resources like those above to help us think of new ideas. It’s also good to see how processes change and adapt over time– in my house, kids don’t just use those lists (still hanging in the kitchen! with ALL NEW notes and ideas added when we think of them!) to tell me what they want for lunch, but they pack their own lunches now.
Hallelujah!
Just like I mentioned last week about getting kids more involved in dinner prep, the more involved they are in their lunch prep increases their food awareness and the likelihood they’ll actually eat their lunch (rather than talking through the entire lunch period like their mother often did).
At any rate, however we can get more nutritious food into our children while making them intelligent consumers is what I care about. Just knowing that the food industry markets designed-to-be-addictive “foods” to them gives them a power to make better choices.
What school lunch strategies do you use?
Hope your school year is off to a healthy start, too.
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