The Great Lunchbox Debate

I love to shop for school supplies. So I'm not the least bit put-out by the massive amounts of supplies sitting in a corner in my dining room waiting on meet-the-teacher night to be deposited into the K, 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms for use by my children and their peers. We try to reuse what we can, and buy quality items when we need to get new. For example - for 29 cents more, a pair of Fiskars blunt-end scissors will last a heck of a lot longer than the Rose Art ones. Same goes for Crayola products - you can't beat 'em. (Except, of course, for those colored bubbles that recently came out - yikes!). And much to my children's sadness, the teachers recommended plain yellow #2 pencils (already sharpened, thank you very much) instead of pencils with TinkerBelle, or the like foiled onto them. Evidently, the cheap-o pencils are harder on the pencil sharpeners than the regular pencils. So having navigated all of that, we moved onto lunch boxes...

I bring my lunch to work most days. I carry a Laptop Lunchbox because I like to eat lunch bento-style.

I'm not really a sandwich, chips and apple kinda girl. I like left overs for lunch. However, I will say one of the issues that I have is that I don't really warm anything up in these containers, and I can't pack already warmed food and expect that it will stay warm. Also, my 7 year old and my 5 year old don't seem to be able to get all the little lids off, and by the time their teacher can help them, lunch is nearly over.

Then, I looked at one of these: a planet lunch box, but it doesn't seem to have the versatility of my laptop lunchbox, where I can remove sections if I needed to.

I also looked at old-school lunchboxes off of eBay. I remember being in the second grade and having a crush on a boy named Brian, just because he had a Dukes of Hazard lunchbox. I loved my Rainbow Brite lunchbox and thermos set. But I didn't love that my apple made a permanent dent in my fluffernutter sandwich. This might be why I'm not a sandwich person. See, blogging really is therapy!

Anyhow, we decided on plain lunch sacks - something similar to this. So that I can put leftovers in our Funtainers, and still have room to pack bento-style using our lock and lock containers.

I love to follow blogs about healthy lunches for both adults and kids. Some cute ones that I look at are:

Another Lunch

Bento Mama

Going Against the Grain - Gluten Free stuff here is awesome!