It's a Beautiful Morning

The sun is shining brightly in the sky. The air is crisp and cool, but the promise of afternoon warmth hangs waiting. Not quite cold enough for a jacket, but cool enough to whisper of Autumn coming.

But for now, it's still technically Summer, and I'm holding on to it until every last leaf has fallen and the ground is white with frost.

So today, we have bright summery foods!

Princess asked for a sandwich for lunch again, and I was happy to oblige. It's hard to tell, but the sandwich is shaped like a butterfly. I tucked grapes in around the butterfly to fill the gaps. Also included is a heart-shaped silicone cup of raspberry Jello with a raspberry sealed inside. The other container holds plum slices, oyster crackers, pretzels with Laughing Cow cheese, and grape tomatoes. These containers are both sandwich boxes. Each one cost $1 at Target, in the dollar bins near the entrance.

Bean's lunch has most of the same ingredients, but put together in a different way. Changing little things, like the way food is presented, helps to keep things interesting even when the ingredients are mostly the same. Bean has a frilled heart shaped pastrami sandwich. Hiding under the sandwich and filling a gap at the top are green grapes. There was plenty of room in the small box to place a layer of grapes on the bottom of the container and lay the sandwich on top. This saves space and keeps the sandwich tucked in tightly, to prevent shifting and sliding. The bottom tier of the other box holds pretzels sticks, Laughing Cow cheese, and oyster crackers, and the top tier holds plum slices and raspberry Jello with a raspberry inside.

This is what those containers look like all packed up. The small box, the three-tier bento, and the bento band were about $3 each at www.allthingsforsale.com . They fit nicely in just about any lunch bag and together hold plenty of food for a kid lunch.

Beaker's lunch is brought to you by the color orange. He chose cheddar cheese, canteloupe, orange Jello with a mandarin orange slice, oyster crackers, and "a fishy sandwich." So I dug through my bin of cookie cutters to find one shaped by a fish. Roughly two hundred cookies cutters and not a single one of them shaped like a fish! So I pulled out a penguin cutter and turned it on its side. Beaker took one look and said, "That not a fish, that a pingin." He gave me a Look, the kind of look only an exasperated three year old can give, and agreed to eat it anyway.