Seriously…nuff said. I love that guy and his chocolate chip eyes and pretzel antlers.

I try to fill lunchboxes with extra love around this time of the year. Obviously, that is all I fill them with, obviously. But everyone loves a chocolate heart, a gummi heart, or a little extra red or pink in their lunch right now, amiright? Especially a 6 and 9 year old boy.

I like this one from love lunches past.

Up top we’ve got some gyoza and soba noodles, mostly because I’ll take whatever opportunity arises to put those cute little fish and pig sauce holders to use. Red apples, milk chocolate heart, red apples, heart gummies, vanilla lactose free yogurt, and a mini orange to wrap up the start to love week.

I will post more photos of “lovely” lunches on Instagram this week, follow us if you don’t.

Happy Love Week!

Aren’t they handsome?

I always love it when I wake up in the morning and plans come together, in the lunchbox. This morning was one of those mornings. The photo above was just a sampling of what my little people are made up of. The photos that follow were from one of the magical mornings when everything just came together. Man, I sure love the blank canvas a bagel offers.

Gus captured me filling his little ketchup pig, with ketchup. Yes, I know that is a mustard bottle. I’m sure someday, I’ll hear the end of that, but I might be waiting for a bit (at least until the bottle is empty). When we go camping, I don’t want to lug a gigantic bottle of anything in the cooler, it just takes up precious space, so I consolidated and the empty mustard bottle just happened to be smaller. So, it got filled with ketchup. I’m my father’s child, through and through. Plus it allows my family to constantly have something to pick on me about. And, they get a special surprise sometimes on their mustard hunts.

Carrots, kiwi, oranges, sausage aka hot dog, scrambled backyard hen eggs, clementine nose, ketchup piggy, chocolate drops, and just a teeny bit of magic. Oh and some Tofutti on that bagel, my kiddos have issues with lactose, so we sub things whenever possible.

A great quote from this morning: Gus: “Oh my gosh, I can’t wait. I am just going to pluck off that sausage and plop it in my mouth.”. I’ll leave you with that.

I felt honored to be featured. You can too.

Here is my story (or you can visit Mamalode’s site to see it with pretty pictures):

I have fond memories of my sack lunches from my childhood. I especially loved the days when I had a special note in the paper bag. Now, for my own kids, I strive to make the lunch itself the note. When my son Simon first went to pre-school seven years ago, I decided to challenge myself to pack a dreamy and healthy lunch for him everyday.

Part of my motivation was that I also wanted to photograph each one and share them virtually to inspire others. The images weren’t always great, but each lunch challenged me to make a better one the next day.

I’ve spent some time in Japan and fell in love with the Japanese way of doing things, including the use of Bento boxes. I also tend to gravitate toward adorable and colorful things. It’s all the better when you can eat those adorable colorful things!

So, I decided to take it up a notch. Why not make food fun? Why not make packing a lunchbox fun? These days, I cram so much love into my lunches that I hope my kids can feel it while nourishing themselves.

My lunchbox of choice has changed over the years but I like PlanetBox the most. But, if it’s a soup day, then I’ll use Lunchbots Thermos’. I also love the multiple compartments of a Bento which makes the challenge so much more inviting.

Special tools that I use include: egg molds, cookie cutters, sandwich cutters, a rice cooker, vegetable cutters and nori punches.

I frequently get asked if my kids actually eat what I pack them. My oldest eats his whole lunch every day. My youngest eats most of it. He often polishes it off after he gets home from school. When we talk about what we’re thankful for, both of my boys say they are thankful for their lunches. This may not always be the case, but for now, I will take the small victories and fill tiny bellies with healthy goodness when I can!

I am pretty in love with these new sauce holders. I happened to fill them with soy sauce on this particular ‘back to school’ eve, after our long holiday break. I can’t think of which other sauces might be useful in these little buggers. I’m open to suggestions? Maybe some of you have them and fill them with goodness.

They work! My kid polished off their rice. I bet the cute new nori punches and rice molds helped with that as well. We have 9 different face punches to choose from in the morning, now.

As you can see, I’m still really into the bagel faces. Sometimes, nothing beats a bagel face.

This time of year it is hard to break free from many of the same fresh fruits, we live in Montana, so we don’t have access to as much as we wish we did. We eat apples…everyday. We eat kiwis…almost everyday. We love those itty bitty oranges. We canned a plethora of applesauce in the fall, so we have that to fall back on, thankfully. You’ll see a lot of those things in our winter lunches.

We also have a collection of cute little picks to add some finishing touches. This made Homemade Chicken Pot Pie so much more delish. I warn Simon each morning I put them in his lunch box. It wouldn’t surprise me if he accidentally threw one down the hatch.

It wouldn’t be humanly possible for me to catch up on every single lunch I’ve got a photo of…so it is probably high time for another collage. Coming soon!

Here is one of my favorite faces from last week.

Daia cheese hair, peanut butter skin, frozen strawberry nose, Cheerio mouth, hard-boiled egg eyes, edamame pupils on a plain bagel. Mmm.

And some peas.

In our family garden we’ve got tomatoes coming out of our ears.

We even share with our backyard hens, sometimes.

Those sweet hens give us delicious eggs to eat in our lunches, so a fresh tomato every now and again isn’t hard to part with. Today’s main course was a burrito with black beans, fresh garden tomatoes and a backyard hen egg. We’re lucky people.

What is the saying? She has legs up to her neck.

Sexy carrots! The rest of that lunch ain’t to shabby either. Those fresh garden tomatoes are awfully pretty. We also munched on clementines, homemade zucchini bread (from a friend), blueberry lactose free yogurt with blueberry eyes and almond teeth, diced apple, and backyard plums.

Fall Harvest Time = Lunchbox Magic

Don’t forget to follow on Facebook and Instagram to see even more lunches. Blog posting on a regular basis isn’t my forte these days, try as I might.

I’m not exactly sure how that happened. Where did the time go? When did Simon get so big? He turns 9 in 5 days. I can’t carry him anymore, at least not without grunting.

I’m not thrilled with my ‘first day lunch’ but I’ve granted myself a do-over. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I would eat those lunches in a heartbeat, but I had about 5 minutes to pack them and I was hoping to do something a bit more extravagant. I packed, in a frenzy, some edamame, cabbage, chicken udon stir fry, from dinner the night before, and leftover spaghetti, for the kiddo who doesn’t care for cabbagg. Luckily, we’d stocked up on fruit the day before: blueberries, raspberries, grapes, and little oranges are some favorites that I knew would make happy bellies. Chocolate drops for dessert, and GO!

I took the extra time to take a few photos before I shimmied away in the morning and wasn’t seen much until the following day, after the boys had already gone off to their 2nd day of school. Never fear, on day 2, Papa packed the lunch!

I love Papa’s lunch. They really didn’t miss me. They had it covered.

Where was I?…

Welcoming my new nephews into this big big world. They decided the first day of school would be the magical day.

Meet Baby A & Baby B.

They are the newest dreamboats in our growing family. They are Simon and Gus’s new baby cousins.

Tomorrow, I will make lunch. Today, I had much more important things to do.

I hope your first day was just as dreamy as ours.

Some of our summertime favorites can be spotted above. Oh man that fruit salad! Mmmm. What on earth should I make in the morning. Minecraft Lunch for my 1st and 4th graders? Yipes!

Wee. I love me some rainbow lunch! This rainbow is made up of a fresh backyard hen egg, avocado and ham sandwich on Wheat Montana Bread, with a side of diced organic apple, soy yogurt, tiny tomatoes, peas, a clementine, & of course, some chocolate drops.

We’ve been slacking this summer. I haven’t posted here in quite some time, but I wanted to give you some fresh ideas for back to school. If you want this amazing lunchbox we are so in love with, you can follow this link, to get yours!

We’ve had several opportunities this summer to make some lunch and we’ve been growing/harvesting/canning delicious garden goodies for the fall/winter/spring, but this Mama has been slacking on the blog.

We’ve been doing things like this instead of posting on the blog.

We’ve been spending summer as it ought to be spent, playing outside, almost non-stop. We’re so lucky to live in a place with rivers, rocks, mountains to climb, and camping spots galore. I feel like our summer was pure bliss.

The boys even planted their very own gardens this year.

We’ve had a family garden for several years, but never our very own gardens. We planted them a bit late in the season but they’ve flourished and we’ll have a small bounty from each of them, and the boys are proud. Plus, growing your own food somehow makes the food taste so much more delicious. The little dumplings like things that they “don’t like” when they plant the seeds.

I keep asking the boys what they want for their first day of school lunch. I don’t know if I can top last year’s spread. I’ve been wracking my brain trying to come up with a creative delicious idea. So far, I’ve got nothin’. I have a little bit less than a week.

I’m hoping to post just one lunchbox idea a day until the FIRST day of 4th and 1st grade. Wish me luck.