With Connor in Grade 1 this year, we’ve entered the world of making school lunches. Rich was excited about this on the first day of school and insisted on making Connor’s lunch, and I happily allowed that to turn into the new routine. But I’ve started doing them lately in an effort to make mornings easier, and it helps with my own plan to not feel like crap anymore. If I’m making lunch for Connor it’s easy to put together two containers of veggies and two of fruit and two of crackers and hummus (and give myself a pat on the back for eating healthy while I’m at it too).
Connor, of course, has a cool lunch kit with coloured containers that all fit nicely in his Batman lunch bag (which even has a cape), but now I do too, because I got a Rubbermaid LunchBlox set.
This has been awesome for a few reasons. For one, it encourages the above-mentioned healthy eating. We have a great market in the building I work in, but it’s a little too easy to wander down and get some chocolate banana bread when the 3:00 hunger hits. I’ve swapped that habit for a different one – filling the orange container with veggies and the green with hummus. My veggie intake (definitely the hardest part of healthy eating for me) has gone way up.
The blue section can be used as one big container, or there are a couple of inserts you can use to split things up as well. I’ve been taking a salad mix to work, so this works well for that, and I can add salad toppings (nuts, seeds, cranberries) to the other containers and mix it all together at lunchtime.
The containers snap together, and the whole lot snaps onto a layer of Blue Ice, which is handy when I don’t feel like putting my lunch in the fridge.
I’ve struggled for a long time to get in the habit of taking a lunch that has more things that are good for me than things I like. (Hi, my name is Robin and I’m a carbaholic.) I don’t know why this helps (maybe it’s similar to how fun-coloured pens always made doing homework seem easier), but it does.
Got any lunch tips for me? Sooner or later the carrots and snap peas are going to get boring, and I’d like to find ways to keep things interesting.
Disclosure: I am part of the Rubbermaid Blogger Campaign with Mom Central Canada and I receive special perks as part of my affiliation with this group. The opinions on this blog are my own.
