School lunches

As most of you know, I've been back at work for the last 7 weeks. I am fully enjoying being back at it, but on the home side of things, I need to be a bit more creative in my family's care.

My house shows the lack of love (which I'm cool with at the moment, I'm too tired to entertain anyway) and the care and forethought that once went into packing creative, nutritional lunches for my children has also gone down the tubes. Sigh.

My boys LOVE their veggies. Sending carrots & celery for lunch was always well received. Not the pre-peeled baby carrots either - they wanted the biggest, fattest one in the 5 lb bag in the fridge. The bigger, the better. And they WILL measure with each other and this IS a source of taunting. "My carrot's bigger - neener, neener, neener".

Lunches as of late look pretty much the same, and pretty boring. A jam sandwich (although peanut butter is not banned at their school, I am still in MB mode where pb is not allowed in any school or childcare facility - I think that is a good rule of thumb and I'm so thankful my children are not afflicted with a life threatening allergy as such). They also get a granola bar or cookies and a plant form that usually consists of fruit leather or fruit gummies. (The Mott's REAL fruit gummies - not just the candy - b/c I'm sure there's a difference!)

Part of my teaching job involves supervision (I'm teaching elementary now! Never done that before!!) Lunches have gotten VERY interesting. I supervise grade 4 students eating in their class. I am beyond intrigued at what some of them will bring in those fancy little licensed lunch kits.

Some go quite healthy and some are way off in the other direction. Either or, I felt a bit sorry for my own kids with their plain jam sandwich. These kids bring hot dishes of all manner and many with a bag of popcorn to pop & take outside for lunch recess with them!!

One day I looked around and saw in one class, no less than 11 (yes, I counted) kids with a little fruit shaped plastic container full of sugar. I kid you not. I know my own lunch prep skills are lacking, but even gummy fruit badness beats out a container of 2 tablespoons worth of straight up sugar. Wow!!! I have no further comment on that.

What do your kids take for lunch? A little help here!