Today you can also find me at Just.Be.Enough. talking about balance between family life and personal goals.
Last week, I talked about how I come up with my School Lunch menu. This week, I am going to talk about all the gorey details that goes into packing my lunches.
Ways to avoid Armageddon from an always moving mom to Seven
Packing school lunches
The first thing I needed was a container. I was tired of brown lunch bags and buying oodles of ziploc baggies. I seriously think we kept them in business. After doing lots of research, I discovered EasyLunchboxes and love them. The lids are kid-friendly and the lunch box that goes with them fits the containers perfectly. There is also enough space for an ice pack and a thermos if necessary.
Another thing that I always struggled with was fitting in fixing lunch into my morning routine. I will put it out there right now: I am not a fan of mornings and the less interaction between me and my children early in the morning, the better. The second problem is the fact that I have four in school full time. So it’s not just one or two lunches, but four. Next year there will be five.
So I devised a way to minimize the morning chaos. On Sunday, we spend an hour and assemble the majority of the lunches. I allow my children to eat school lunch once a week, so we just assemble 4 lunches. That is 1 lunch per kid. Each child chooses a lunch from the menu and helps with the preparation. It teaches them responsibility, gets them excited for lunch and teaches them cooking skills all at the same time.
Each child has a specific color lid that is always theirs. (The image didn’t look so blurry on Instagram!)
After lunches are prepped, I use a white board marker and write the name of the lunch and then they are brought to our second refrigerator in the basement. (And yes, with 7 kids I absolutely have to have 2 refrigerators!!!)
I have learned a few other tricks in these months of packing lunches. Here are just a few:
1. When using a thermos to keep things hot, heat the thermos with boiling water for about five minutes Then empty the water and add your lunch item By heating up the core of the thermos, it will keep the food warm much longer
2. Likewise, if you are sending cold food in the thermos, put it in the freezer for about five minutes first.
3. Press and seal on the EasyLunchboxes works brilliantly. I can send things like yogurt and applesauce without any leakage.
4. Freeze things! Gogurt and cheese sticks will be perfect by lunch time if frozen over night.
5. For warm sandwiches, you can wrap them in aluminum foil to keep the heat in. It won’t be hot at lunch time, but find me a kid who actually eats food when it’s hot!
6. To keep track of which lunch is which, use a whiteboard marker on the plastic container. It wipes right off!
7. The #1 thing that will make your lunches successful is planning! If you commit to plan ahead, you can provide interesting, healthy lunches for your children!
EasyLunchboxes are the #1 best-selling lunchboxes on Amazon.com and as part of today’s post, Kelly, owner of EasyLunchboxes is giving away one lunch container set and one lunch bag (winner can choose colors). Closed
This giveaway is offered to US residents only.
Please do not enter this giveaway if you have won or received free product from EasyLunchboxes within the past 3 months.
You can also find them on Amazon where they offer free shipping.
To enter today’s giveaway, Giveaway closed you must visit EasyLunchboxes, then come back and leave me a comment telling me what you like about their product. For additional entries, you can like me on Facebook, like EasyLunchboxes on Facebook, followEasyLunchboxes on Pinterest or follow me on Pinterest. Each action requires a separate comment in order to count. Comments will close Saturday at midnight and a winner will be randomly generated.
All information is my own opinion and I was not compensated for this post.