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!

You can't eat healthy foods if you can't find it!

I'm sure we've all heard stories about people who have eaten expired food and become deathly ill. Well, sadly, I was looking through my pantry and came across quite a few expired items. Out came a trash bag and more stuff from my house went into the landfill, sadly. Currently, our pantry is a couple of cheap stand up cabinets from Target. Eventually, we'd like to get some nice IKEA cabinets for this wall, but alas, there seems to be too much month at the end of our money, so that project will have to come at another time.

I took everything out of the pantry last week and tossed anything that was expired. For more information about expired foods you could look here at this article about what all those sell-by, display until and expires on dates mean.

After putting the pantry all back together, I moved the fruit rack from one of the kitchen counters (the kids couldn't reach it) down to a lower surface for easy after school access.

I also went through all of our dried fruits, pretzels, banana chips and other fun school lunch snacks and packaged them in sandwich baggies. I realize this is a huge area that I need to work on, because while it is more convenient for me to just grab a baggie and send it in a lunchbox it's not as green as I'd like to be with our lunch packings. I use a laptop lunchbox for my lunch when I bring lunch to work. I'm considering purchasing one for each of the kids, but again, it's more of a want than a need right now.
Anyhow, I thought I'd share my tiny pantry make-under and the easy access snack areas to chase the "I'm hungry" monsters away after school and to ease the lunch-packing rush in the morning. I pack 15 lunches weekly and could use any tips or trips you got!