Kindergarten lunches

Becky asked for some thoughts on kindergartener lunches for our respective new kindergarteners or soon to be kindergarteners(they grow so fast!). i thought i'd share with the world.  

This is the lunch I packed for Noah for tomorrow's art camp (he starts Kindergarten on the 28th).  inside the lidded container is cottage cheese, that's a chocolate zucchini muffin with the top chopped off cause, ahem, we had an incident that required me to chop off the tops of all our chocolate zucchini muffins (so sad!).  A bologna and cheese sandwich, a few prunes, carrots, peaches, string cheese and you kinda can't tell, a fruit roll up.  

We're pretty boring and usually pack something like this just about every day, with minor modifications here and there.  there's usually a sandwich (sometimes leftover pasta or pizza or something) and either yogurt or cottage cheese and a string cheese.  then, i always pack at least 1 kind of fruit, sometimes more when they are in season.  fresh stuff when we have it, otherwise apple sauce or thawed fruit from the freezer.  i typically put something bread-y in there like pretzels, goldfish, crackers, graham crackers, etc.  today it was a muffin.  noah doesn't usually like to eat raw veggies, but he'll have carrot sticks or snap peas or cucumber.  that's it!  

here's another example of a bento lunch i packed him several years ago.  not much has changed and we need it to be nut free now!  

If you want to go nuts, there are lots of fun pictures here as well, all using the awesome Laptop lunches lunchbox.  And the best part?  Most everyone in the family has a bento lunchbox like this (not carter since his school provides him a lunch).  here's the one for daddy.  his overflows the bento box a bit, but that's ok.

This is mama's for tomorrow but don't worry because i have a lunch seminar to go to tomorrow and so i just needed a few snacks.  ha! 

and that's the lunchiness from this house.  i make them the night before.  if i'm focused it takes 15-20 minutes to do all 3.  other times, maybe more like 45 minutes.  or if i'm really putzing (like, by taking pictures), maybe an hour.