Lunch in A Box!

I've heard of Christmas in July, but how about New Year's resolutions in August? As another school year for Noah fast approaches, I have a resolution, to make him really creative, super nutritious lunches. The lunches that I packed last school year and over this summer while Noah's been in camp were definitely nutritious, but usually lacked as much uniqueness and creativity as I would have liked. Surprisingly, It doesn't have to take a lot of time or money to make these kind of lunches! I'd sometimes cut up tiny finger sandwiches with cookie cutters shaped like stars and hearts or fan out some kiwi, but 95% of the time, I am told the food would go uneaten. I genuinely enjoy making bento inspired lunches and hope that perhaps the fun element to them will coax Noah to eat sooner or later. I'm not going to give up trying!

On several occasions concerned teachers have approached me to say that Noah hasn't been eating his lunch. I always reassure them that it's OK, that he usually doesn't really eat much at home either. A typical day, consists of just a few bites at meal time if we're lucky. Most days he only has a number of bites at about 2 meals. The kid lives off of milk. After a year and a half of struggling to get Noah to eat and worrying about giving him too much milk (hence filling him up and keeping him from eating solids), his pediatrician told us that at this stage, if he just isn't a big eater, it's ok to give him milk with and between meals. It's better for Noah to get the calories and protein from milk than to not get much throughout the day. He's doing just fine.

I gotta say, it can be super frustrating though. We end up wasting a ton of food with every meal we make and after cooking something nice for your child, it's hard when they almost never touch it. Speaking of touching, oddly, Noah will just not eat things that have two ingredients or more touching. For example, he has never eaten a sandwich, not even PB&J! He will for example eat spaghetti sauce if it is thin and covering spaghetti, but if has anything like ground beef or veggies in the sauce, there's no way! This weekend we got him some fabulous rice pudding from Zingerman's, but he wouldn't even try it because there were a few raisins in it. Veggie medleys, fruit cocktails, casseroles, soups full of ingredients, they are really hard to get him to try. So, for now, in his school lunches, he ignores most everything except for these great little Horizon or Trader Joe's Milk drink boxes and yogurt tubes I put in.

This post is getting too long. What I really came here to share with you is THIS awesome website! It's called "LUNCH In A BOX" and it's just wonderful. The picture above is from the web site, a hand crafted toddler lunch by "Biggie", the site's author. Biggie is a fabulously creative woman out in San Francisco who makes these great bento lunches for her husband and young son. The site is chock full of great ideas, time saving techniques, the photos are delicious and she always adds in informative links and even some tutorials. This is definitely one of my favorite places to stop on the Internet.

Thanks a bunch Biggie, you've really inspired me! You guys should check it out too. If I make some neat lunches down the road, I'll be sure to post them! What's your preschooler lunch specialty?