Smile for the Camera!

School picture day! Time to dress up nice, fancy up your hair, smile your brightest smile... and then look messy, awkward, and unkempt by the time the photographer snaps the pic. I do love to chronical their tense, faked smiles from every year though. 

Beaker's Smiling Lunch includes:

Happy bunny hard boiled egg with carrot disks

Starry watermelon and apple slices

Cheery gummy bears

Sweet yogurt

Smiling gluten free granola bar

When you lunch reminds you to put on a happy face!

Inside the Planet Box inner dish is tasty yogurt topped with brightly colored sprinkles. 

Happy (Belated) Halloween!

Between sports and school and work and house and other work and a myriad of other, we have been keeping busy here. We're putting the Chaos in, for sure! I'm still packing lunches every day for Beaker, though I've slacked on the pictures and posting portion. A little back log to share!

This is how we Halloween:

Frightful lunch includes:

Grapes from beyond the grave

Watchful carrots (they're good for your monster eyes)

Meat rolls

Gluten Free mint chocolate cookies

Rice crackers

Soft cheese

The mint chocolate cookies are amazing. I forget the brand name, but they taste like Girl Scouts Thin Mints and are completely safe for Beaker!

The weather was monsterous this year. It poured rain for most of Halloween. We darted out to do a little Trick or Treating during a slight break in the clouds. My mini beasties still had lots of fun with their friends!

Bean was a dark fairy, Beaker was a little vampire, and Lulu was a creepy doll.

Sailing Away

Arr! More pirate lunches, ahoy!

In this lunch:

Watermelon pieces

Blueberries

Greek yogurt

Sandwich with Udi's GF bread

GF pie piece

Van's GF cheese crackers

Our little pirate friend is hanging out on a gluten free ham and cheese sandwich. X marks the spot in a square of gf pie, which Beaker declared the best EVER (not homemade though - I can't remember the brand name, but they are little individual pies sold at a local store). And a treasure chest of golden crunchy 'coins' is tucked in below the X.

I really love the silicone tray I used to make this frozen Greek yogurt skull. It gets a ton of use here! I keep a bag of frozen yogurt shapes in the freezer, and when the kids want a cold snack they can just pull a skull or some bones out of the bag and enjoy. I love how freezing yogurt makes it seem like a sweet treat dessert, but it has a nice pack of calcium and protein, too! And freezing it into shapes is just an extra fun bonus.

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Bento Ahoy!

Autumn is rolling up fast here! The mornings are dark and cool longer, and racoons have begun theiving in my henhouse. Locking it up tight to keep those pests out!

Beaker and Bean are starting to count down the days until Halloween, and I'm eyeballing my favorite spooky bento gear already. September is barely half over, but I'm so ready for October! In the meantime, we're making do with more pirate lunches for Beaker.

I love these little bento dishes from BentoUSA. They're small and compact, great for little tummies or packing into smaller lunch tins.

In this lunch:

Van's gluten-free cheese crackers

Babybel mini cheese wheel

gluten free carrot mini cupcake

carrots

ham

grapes

apple pieces

frozen yogurt

frozen blueberries

gluten free granola

Tiny pirate in his little boat, surrounded by golden crunchy 'coins'.

A pirate raft, with carrot planks and ham rolls.

Tasty pirate parfait. The fruit and yogurt thawed while in his snack tin, so when snack time rolled around it was still frozen just enough to taste like a dessert, but thawed enough to be easy to eat with a spoon. I froze Greek yogurt in a shaped silicone ice cube tray to get the fun skull-and-crossbones shape with a good kick of protein to keep my little guy going through the long day.

The small dishes pack up perfectly inside this cute Jake and the Neverland Pirates lunchbox and matching snack tin!

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What is the Plural of TARDIS?

Is it TARDISes? TARDI? Or is TARDIS already pluralized? Hmm.

Anyway, here is a double TARDIS lunch for Bean!

In this lunch:

Two TARDIS sandwich halves

Peeled clementine

Rice nori crackers

I was seriously about 3/4 asleep when I made this lunch. I even had spinach (which she loves!) pulled out of the fridge, ready to go, right next to me and completely forgot to pack it. This is what happens when I try to get up fifteen minutes early to pack lunches in the morning instead of getting them ready the night before! Not quite enough food for an active 12 year old, but luckily Bean had a granola bar and a pack of seaweed snacks in her backpack to nibble. Lesson learned - zombie packing leads to lunch errors!

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