School Family

Before school started, how many of us had resolutions to make school lunches work better for our kids this year?  We certainly had/have great intentions this year, but — wouldn’t you know it?  — school’s only a week old, and already reality has snuck in.  Five days. Three kids.  Fifteen peanut-butter-and-jellies. (Full disclosure — I think there may even have been a peanut-butter-fluff thrown in there. Ouch.)

For those still fighting the good fight, this article from the San Francisco Chronicle is one of the best we’ve seen this year. Solid content. Variety.  And multiple good recipes and options for healthy school lunches.

Several of the commenters on that article cite the same concern I have — how do you balance no time and morning/night craziness with these kind of healthy options?  Fact is that the biggetst reason for our P,B & J binge is the convenience of it. Bus is coming, trying to get the kids dressed and fed in the morning — just no time for mixing up a salad and mixed berries and a wrap sandwich.  Never mind the time to shop for all those ingredients well ahead of time.

So my big question: how do you balance the time crunch with healthy lunches?  I, for one, still need to know.

So our 3 boys trekked back-to-school today, and — among other things — I forgot about the joys of packing lunches for 3 growing boys with different tastes at 6:45 AM. Lovely. The only saving graces were that: 1) they were too concerned about larger issues to grumble about their P, B & J’s today; and 2) I remembered that we have a ton of good stuff here on the site to make school lunches easier.

A bit of schoolfamily.com searching, and i’m already better prepared for tomorrow morning:

1. I do need to do a better job of keeping the kids food safe. This article on food safety for school lunches made me think.

2. I ran across this MomCooks site (even though DadCooks, too) and thought these were some excellent ideas for brown bag lunches your kids will eat. We have a similar article on lunch ideas for kids here.

3. Also think I’ll download a couple of these fun lunchbag labels to use, maybe on Fridays.

Three lunches per day for 180 days…. hmmmmm… only 537 lunchboxes left to fill this year. Egads!

Do you have any favorite school lunch tips of your own? I’m all ears.

When I heard that former President Bill Clinton was on the Rachael Ray show last week, for a brief moment I wondered whether it was a creative campaign appearance for his wife�s White House run. It turns out he’s in the middle of a different kind of campaign, urging schools to serve healthier meals to kids.

Clinton helped form the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, which is tackling the issue of childhood obesity. According to the alliance, 17 percent of American schoolkids are overweight, and school lunches that resemble fast-food fare are a big part of the problem. The alliance is working with schools and major food companies to get more nutritious meals onto kids’ plates.

Of course, serving healthy foods doesn’t do much good if kids won’t eat them. That’s why we’re sharing great ideas for a week’s worth of nutritious sack lunches your kids will actually like.

What’s going on in your child’s lunchroom? Is the school offering healthier meal options, and are kids actually choosing them?

The start of school is five weeks away, and already I’m waking up with night sweats over what to pack for lunch. I barely made it to the end of the school year last month without cracking from the pressure of having to fill my kids lunchboxes day after day. Those last few weeks I’d haul myself into the kitchen at night, flip open the lunch boxes and stare into the void.

My kids are like human roulette wheels when it comes to food. Whether my son will want what I pack for him—a tuna sandwich, for example—is more a matter of chance than preference. Sometimes I’ll hit a lucky streak. My daughter told me last year that she liked cold rotini pasta, so I packed it every day for weeks. But I guess I overplayed the pasta because she got sick of it. I could kick myself for ruining a good thing by not quitting while I was ahead.

If I were wealthy, I’d give the kids money to buy lunch every day. But at $2.25 per meal, I have to limit them to two hot lunches each per week. I should have plenty of time between now and when school starts to think of some good, healthy lunches that my kids will eat. But I won’t. The night before the first day of school, I’ll be staring into two brand-new lunchboxes, wondering what the heck to put in them.