How To Feed a Ladybug: School Lunches!

School lunches...I remember those...and (I am slightly ashamed to admit) I still love some of the stuff they make for kids lunches...all those little snack cakes, fruit roll-ups (except THESE fruit roll-ups are MUCH better!), you name it!

For some reason, I've been really hung up on making sure my kids have a good lunch. Good like taste good, AND good like good for them.

I found a bunch of posts on Pinterest where people put together a whole week's worth of lunches as a time, and was intrigued. There are some heavy-duty tupperware type containers on the market, but (although it took me a few weeks to find them in stock at Target) I found that Ziploc makes a lunch container that works perfectly fine. They may not hold up all year, but they will certainly last long enough for me to get my money's worth, at which point I'll buy more.

The problem I saw on many of the pictures I saw was either A) they packed foods that my kids won't touch, or B) they packed weird amounts of foods, and a lot of different variety (too much in my opinion). Like, ONE strawberry and THREE fruit snacks, or HALF of an apple and HALF of a banana.

What I like about these containers that I found is that there are three compartments - one large one (that will fit either a sandwich or some other "main" dish) and two small ones. Perfect - so I went about planning stuff to put in them. One of their favorite "main" dishes is homemade lunchables - although my kids (the girls especially) LOVE the store bought lunchables, I have a HUGE aversion to them - neither the meat or the cheese seem even real...how can kids eat that stuff? So, we buy our own ingredients to make lunchables, and they get much better quality! We use paper or foil muffin/cupcake liners to hold each item - you could invest in and reuse silicon, but I prefer the luxury of being able to throw the dirty papers away, and they are very inexpensive - especially if you buy holiday ones right after the holiday - the kids' won't care!

In addition to the lunchables, my kids get two sides (I try to make those a fruit and a vegetable, like grapes and tomatoes, or berries and carrots) and a capri sun (that just sits in their lunch bag with the tupperware). If the sides are kind of small, they also get a bag of chips as well, and maybe a gogurt.

These lunches are great for on-the-go activities - I made these ahead of time when I used to take Rylie to soccer practice for her and Zoe - they would both eat in the car and the great thing is that the mess can be contained - just dump any messes into the tupperware and clean out when you get home!

So far, making lunches a week at a time has worked out beautifully and I plan to keep it up for the whole year!

Homemade Lunchables
paper muffin/cupcake liners
Ritz crackers
1 block of deli cheese (my kids like cheddar)
1 package of pre-sliced lunch meat (my kids LOVE salami)

1. Place three cupcake liners in a tupperware container.
2. Place 5-6 crackers (or however many you want!) in one of the liners.
3. Cut cheese into small cubes (I cut mine thin, about the size in a storebought lunchables).
4. Place the same amount of sliced cheese into another liner.
5. Take the same amount of sliced lunch meat, fold into small pieces and place in last liner (I used to cut the salami into small slices so that they would "match" the other sizes, then realized that was a waste of time!)