My girl's are fairly picky when it comes to food. The oldest one rolls her eyes, but will eat almost anything. The younger one refuses to eat unless she's forced. I'm afraid they inherited their pickiness from me. Sorry mom, now I know.
So, when faced with a strange meal everyday they aren't happy. Don't get me wrong, I believe it is good for them to struggle and experience new things. Maybe if they are starving they'll try something new and love it. They react the same when they get a brown bag from home every day. "But all the other kids get pizza..."
I also have concerns with them just having school lunch every day. School lunches have a tendency to be rather processed. My girl's probably waste any foods they don't like leaving them to eat whatever's left. Cost is also huge. The lunches at our school are $1.50 and I'm fairly confident I can pack them something for less than $.50.
Taking everything into consideration, included the kiddos favorite foods, we came up with a plan. I am not going to advertise this as the only way you can do school lunch with your kids, but it is how we are doing it. I feel like it has a nice balance of cost and ease.
To avoid confusion we will be sticking to this basic plan:
- Mondays - Snack Lunch (Crackers, Cheese, Meat, Veggies, Fruits)
- Tuesdays - School Lunch (could be traded with another day)
- Wednesdays - Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich w/ fruit slices
- Thursdays - School Lunch (Pizza Day!)
- Fridays - Ham and Cheese Sandwich w/ Veggies
Any of the sandwiches can be made on any variety of bread, buns or tortillas (just depends on what we have on hand). I'll also include a partially frozen water bottle for cooling/drinking purposes.
You may have also noticed I don't include snacks/juice/chips/pretzels a.k.a. junk food. I'm not against them. I'll include them if and when I can find them at a good enough price. But, at our house those items are available for only rare or special occasions, it's not an everyday occurrence. Just trying to keep it consistent.
To Do: On Sunday afternoon read through lunch menu with girl's and have them initial the meal they want that week.
Buy these great divided containers, with a coupon of course, next time I'm at Wal-mart.
So, that's our plan for this year. I really hope it will work as well as I hope. What are your school lunch plans? (for those of you with school-age kiddos) and/or What was your favorite/least favorite part about school lunch growing up?
Note: This post does contain my Amazon Associate link and I linked up to Org Junkie's Menu plan Roundup.
1 comment:
We're only allowing 1 day of school lunch a week…pizza day. If I let them switch it up it makes it more difficult to keep track of which days who took what kind of lunch (at least with 3 kids it's harder). We also have a "school lunch section" of our pantry that I stock with appropriate school lunch food and they make their own lunches from the stockpile.
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