I’m always concerned about what my Littles are eating!! Daycare lunch menus can be filled with Mac and cheese, hot dogs and even pizza Fridays! I’d much rather send my kids with food that grows their brain instead of something that can cause them health issues. That being said, we do let our kids have Mac and cheese and hot dogs, we just do it at a minimum and send them with healthy alternatives most of the time.
I pick up ingredients when we grocery shop and then pack it all up on Sunday! We use 4 oz jelly jars for yogurt or 1 cup glass Tupperware jars. Bonus:: Cambri is learning to love helping me pack the lunches, and having them all prepped makes it that much easier!!
The kids lunch usually consists of 6 items: a meal, vegetables, fruit, yogurt, cheese stick and a mandarin orange.
- The Meal: this is usually just meal prepped from whatever we ate the night before or we replace with (gasp) peanut butter and jelly if we don’t have leftovers.
- Vegetable: we chop everything up and arrange. Usually some mix of baby carrots, cucumber, red/orange/yellow bell pepper (sweeter than green), olives, sweet peas, salami and dollop of hummus. My kids LOVE hummus, so it helps wash down all those veggies.
- Fruit: usually we do strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, grapes, or kiwi. However, I find that kiwi gets gross really fast, so we only prep for a couple days if we use that. If you need an easy, chemical free cleaner for your berries, click here>>> http://amberlaunstein.norwex.biz/en_US/customer/shop/product-detail/177760
- Yogurt: we believe in healthy fats to grow a child’s brain! We try to use yogurt made with whole milk (never use the kind that says no fat). Check your labels for sugar, because even Greek yogurts can have more sugar than ice cream! Also, look for it to have live bacteria. That’s one benefit of yogurt…a healthy gut. Let’s mix our own up…one tub of Greek yogurt, 1/2 cup kefir (for the healthy gut), 1 cup frozen raspberries, 2 frozen bananas, three tablespoons flax seed, 2 tablespoons chia seeds. Mix well in your blender and serve in jelly jars. You can keep in your fridge or freezer, and reuse the lids since we aren’t sealing them. However, throw kids out when they get rusty.
- Cheese Stick & Orange. Pretty simple. We get mozzarella cheese usually. For oranges, halo are the best because they peel easy!!
Questions?? Or what do you pack for your kids? We need some variety in our life. Drop your lunch menu below 👇🏼
Amber Launstein 