Summer Lunches

This post was previously posted on the Bentology website. This post contains affiliate links.

Even though it is summer we are still packing lunches for work, camp and trips to the beach and pool. I love going shopping with my kids this time of year so they can pick out fresh fruit and vegetables for their lunches!

This summer lunch contains:

• a simple herb salad and cheese wrap, 
• a mini pepper, 
• blueberry yogurt topped with fresh blueberries and 
• a few farm fresh strawberries. 

The perfect lunch for work!

My kids prefer smaller portions and a variety of choices. The Bentology Bento Lunch Box makes packing several food groups so easy. No matter if you are packing for camp, school, or a day at the pool, with the right prep you can pack this lunchbox in under 5 min!

This colorful lunch contains:

• a mini pepper and baby carrots, 
• blueberries with a few raspberries, 
• strawberries, 
• Goldfish crackers,
• three mini stamped ice cream sandwiches filled with nut butter and 
• yogurt topped with fresh raspberries. 

Here a few tips to make packing lunches a little easier:

• Pick out the fruits and veggies you plan to pack with your kids at the store. They are more likely to eat them if they got to decide which ones to pack or try.
• Prep prep prep! Wash the fruits and veggies when you get home and store them in a container in the fridge ready to go. That way healthy snacks are always available and you save time when making lunch. I often shop and prep on Sundays so I am ready for the week. 
• It is so much easier to plan and pack at night after the kids are in bed then in the morning when you are rushing out the door! So, pre-pack what you can and store the Laptop Lunches containers in either your fridge or on the counter until you need them.

• --> I filled the containers that need to be refrigerated the night before and placed them in the fridge. Take advantage of the fact that two of the Laptop Lunches containers have lids (but you can also cover the containers with plastic foil if need be). I highly recommend the Bento Buddies if you pack lunch every day since you get 4 lidded containers in the set! I filled one container with crackers and pre-cut the bread to save time in the morning as well. I used a fondant plunger to make the ice cream shaped bread but even a simple cookie cutter can make lunch more fun! I started with one star shaped cookie cutter 2 years ago. I just place the bread back into the bread bag and seal it. That way I only need to fill the sandwich in the morning. With a little prep packing a healthy and colorful lunch is fast and fun!

• Don't forget last night's left overs! They make great lunches the next day!
• Always have some healthy snacks in the fridge you can add to your lunchbox in the morning when your are short on time.
• Freeze juice pouches or to go yogurts to keep your lunchbox cold and the drink and food fresh on hot summer days!

ThisBentology bento box contains:

• left over macaroni and cheese with carrot flowers
• cheese crackers
• fruit gummies
• a peach, sliced
• a yogurt to go and
• a frozen juice pouch to keep the lunch cold until it's time to eat

Have a great summer!

National Guacamole Day #GuacitForward

Happy National Guacamole Day! I have partnered with Wholly Guacamole® and Laptop Lunches to celebrate this fun holiday (we all need a reason to celebrate with guacamole, am I right? Psst, find the giveaway from last week or at the end of this post and win some yummy guacamole and Laptop Lunches Bento Buddies!)!

Wholly Guacamole® wants to celebrate National Guacamole Day this year by paying it forward and they need your help!

Use the hashtag #GuacitForward on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to share how you are paying it forward! Together we can put a lot of smiles on people's faces! 

So, how did we celebrate National Guacamole Day?

We packed a fun Guacamole lunch in our Laptop Lunches Bento Box:

• Classic Wholly Guacamole® mini
• tortilla chips
• ham, cheese, salad and hummus wraps and 
• baby carrots and a piece of last night's corn

I also added a matching Lunchbox Love Card to encourage my kids to #GuacitForward today!

And to celebrate National Guacamole Day, you can win some fun Wholly Guacamole® and Laptop Lunches goodies:

• a set of Laptop Lunches Avocado Bento Buddies and 

• an awesome Wholly Guacamole® cooler full of:

• 3 Guacamole Trays (various flavors)

• 2 mini cups (various flavors)

• Chip Clip

• Avocado Squeezie

a Rafflecopter giveaway

National Guacamole Day Celebration with Wholly Guacamole and Laptop Lunches {with GIVEAWAY}

National Guacamole Day is this coming up this Tuesday and Wholly Guacamole® is celebrating by giving back to the community and encouraging others to do the same! With their #GuacitForward campaign Wholly Guacamole® wants to encourage everyone to pay it forward! They are also spotlighting their partners who contribute to charity and pay it forward. Wholly Guacamole® and Laptop Lunches have teamed up for an amazing Giveaway and you can win some fun and yummy lunch stuff while giving back!

Doesn't this Shrimp pasta salad look delicious? For fun lunch ideas using Wholly Guacamole® head over to their website. When you get there, select Lunch ideas and you can scroll through all the Grown-Up and Kid's lunch ideas. If you click on the recipe name, a convenient shopping list pops up to make it easier to pack your own yummy Wholly Guacamole® lunch!

I let my kids look at all the fun lunch ideas and this deconstructed Nacho lunch was their favorite. I am glad there is an easy printable list on Wholly Guacamole®'s website and I am always looking for new lunch packing ideas. Would your kids love this?

For more ideas on how to pack a great National Guacamole Lunch go to Wholly Guacamole®.

And to find out more on how to  #GuacitForward:

So what can you win?

• a set of Laptop Lunches Avocado Bento Buddies and 

• an awesome Wholly Guacamole® cooler full of:

• 3 Guacamole Trays (various flavors)

• 2 mini cups (various flavors)

• Chip Clip

• Avocado Squeezie

Enter my easy giveaway below! Good Luck!
(Shipping address has to be in contiguous United States).

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Winner will be notified via email and has 24 h to claim their prize before I will draw a new winner!

5 Easy Steps to Making Lunchboxes More Fun

This post was previously published at Diana Rambles as part of the 4 great Bloggers, 4 great tips for the Back2School Bentoing series.

This post contains affiliate links.

Packing fun lunches is not as hard as you think and doesn't necessarily require a cabinet full of bento lunch supplies or artistic skills. With a few (and inexpensive) touches you can change your child's lunchbox into a fun lunch!

1) Cupcake decorations

In the picture above I added a reusable silicone straw and a cupcake decoration from the party store to dress up the lunch. My kids were thrilled to slurp their applesauce through the straw and with a quick cupcake decoration I made this simple lunch more exciting. And as you see the lunch came back completely eaten!

Same with this St. Patrick's Day lunch. I added three St. Patrick's Day themed cupcake rings from my local cake store and made this simple lunch festive and fun!

2) Silicone Cups

To add some color and fun I simply added a cute orange mini silicone cup to hold some Almonds and dressed up this simple Laptop Lunchbox.

Silicone cups can also serve as dividers and enable you to pack smaller portions and a larger variety of food which especially appeals to younger children and picky eaters.

3) Sandwich Cutters

This lunch was made more fun with a cute plane sandwich. It was made using a Lunch Punch Cutter. The cutter is easy to use (just press down and done) and removes the crust while making your kids sandwich exciting and fun!

These mini sandwiches were transformed with a sandwich stamp from All Things For Sale. No artistic skill required. But the outcome is an adorable and appealing lunch.

Another fun to use sandwich cutter is the CuteZCute animal sandwich cutter. It cuts the crust off (again, great for picky eaters) and you can choose between four different animal faces. Quick, easy and fun in no time at all.

4) A Lunchbox Note

Adding a fun Lunchbox Love note - no matter if homemade or similar to this store bought Lunchbox Love Card (joke edition) - sure will put a smile on your child's face and make lunch a little more special.

5) Food

But even if you don't have any of the tools above you can still make a cute lunch. This summer BLT lunch was simply made special by adding three Goldfish crackers and with two deli sandwich picks. Similar ones are available at the Dollar Store.

I hope I could show you a few tips and tricks on how to transform you child's lunchbox from drab to fab with a few simple steps. For more product ideas visit my bento basics page.

Here is what I used to make these lunches fun:

Storybook Bento: Origami Yoda

March is National Reading Month and Laptop Lunches asked us to help them celebrate with a storybook bento! We love our Literary Lunch series and the kids were excited to be able to pick the book themselves this time! They picked their current favorite: The Strange Case of Origami Yoda by Tom Angleberger!

The Strange Case of Origami Yoda is about the good and bad dynamics of a sixth-grade class and Dwight, an unpopular kid, who talks to his friends via an origami finger puppet of Yoda. If that's not already strange enough - Origami Yoda is surprisingly wise and on point. He predicts the date of a pop quiz, guesses who stole the classroom Shakespeare bust, and saves a classmate from popularity-crushing embarrassment with some well-timed advice. Tommy, Dwight's classmate, sets out to figure out how Origami Yoda can be so wise when Dwight is...well...so clueless. This is a great and fun book for kids 8-12. You can even learn how to fold your own Origami Yoda! We truly love this series and have reached book four in the series. Join us in reading this witty series of books any middle schooler with a love of Star Wars is surely to enjoy!

Our Origami Yoda Laptop Lunches Bento Box lunch is filled with:

• Broccoli and cheese stars
• an Origami Yoda Pepperoni and Salad wrap with a green grape light saber
• kiwi and strawberries with more light sabers ( you can never have enough of those!)
• and a Star Wars swirled yogurt with a Yoda wafer (thanks, Sis!)

What we used to make this lunch (contains affiliate links):

Otis Dooda: Downright Dangerous - a Literary Lunch

This lunch was previously posted over at The Little Crooked Cottage as a Literary Lunch for Mr. Pig's interview with Buddy. Head over to the fabulous blog of four children's book authors and check out the interview with Otis to find out what he would bring in case he would get stranded on a deserted island!

Do you know Otis Dooda? If not don't miss the story of Otis and the Dooda family (including their rat named Smoochie) moving to New York City and well... the incredibly strange, but true, things that happened to them. In the second Otis Dooda book, written by Ellen Potter, things get even stranger! This time there might be an alien invasion and there is still someone evil living in a potted plant in the lobby...

Our Downright Dangerous Lunch is packed in Laptop Lunches (so it can easily be concealed) and contains:

• a new blank page in Otis Dooda's book (yogurt with fruit leather letters). What will happen in this new adventure?
• baby alien eggs on wild blueberries
• the strange evil guy in the potted plant (sugar peas)
• and of course a ham and cheese LEGO sandwich

Things I used for this lunch (contains affiliate links):

Vegan Lunch for Work in Laptop Lunches

Have you made any New Year's Resolutions? One of mine is to eat healthier (and less) and therefore packing a lunch for myself and keeping track is a great way to prevent snacking around all day. I found this free site to help me keep track of the calories and lunch today is packed in my Laptop Lunches Bento Box:

 

I packed myself a colorful lunch with:

• a mixed leaf salad (2 cups of spinach and baby romaine lettuce)
• grape tomatoes (4 small ones, chopped)
• avocado (1/2 a medium avocado, sliced)
• mango (1 teaspoon, chopped)
• cilantro (a few leaves)
• home made dressing (2 TBS oil and red wine vinagrette)
• strawberries (8 small ones) and
• 8 gluten-free tortilla chips

Nutritional Info: cal: 555, fat: 37 g, protein: 17g, sodium: 500 mg, sugar: 9.5 g

Did you spot the red and white napkin in my Laptop Lunches? It is one of our new Funkins napkins! If you want to win a set of your own head over to our GIVEAWAY! Good Luck!

Christmas Laptop Lunches Bento Box

Happy Monday! Only 9 days until Christmas!

I pack our Laptop Lunches bento box for my middle schooler every day but because he leaves for school relatively early I never get a chance to get a good picture. He was leaving later today so here is his Christmas Laptop Lunches bento box:

We packed:

• candy cane stripe apples
• snow popcorn with blue snowflake sprinkles and a mini chocolate Santa
• cucumbers and peppers
• a Santa peanut butter sandwich
• and a cereal bar tucked under our Funkins candy cane napkin

Look! Lunch! {Gluten Free}

Here are two recent gluten free school lunches. We are trying to keep one of my sons gluten free to determine if that would help with the recent bouts of stomachaches he has been having. I am very new to gluten free so we are still learning :)

Our yubo is packed with a gluten free lunch today:

• a Cocoa Loco bar from Enjoy Life
• Naturebox Cranberry Almond bites
• two tuxedo wearing onigiri
• applesauce and
• a gluten free coconut chocolate chip muffin - home made with rice flour

Our Laptop Lunches bento box is packed with:

• a gluten free coconut and blueberry muffin
• gluten free popcorn
• almonds
• a gluten free cheese sandwich and
• apple sauce

Friday Lunches

It's Friday! We survived the first week of school! So glad it is the weekend and we have an extra day off! Happy Labor Day Weekend!

Here are our lunches from today:

My second grader is not a fan of sandwiches and had been asking for onigiri. I had left over rice from last night and made him a fun Onigiri lunch in his Goodbyn Bynto. We packed:

• two funny onigiri and one wrapped onigiri with seasoning
• garden cucumbers
• baby carrots
• red peppers
• and some cheddar popcorn

My third grader wanted his Laptop Lunches bento box today. It is filled with:

• a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
• garden cucumbers and red peppers
• cheddar popcorn and a small serving of all natural fruit snacks
• apple sauce
• a cereal bar

I also added a fun new Lunchbox Love Card from the new joke editions! Perfect humor for a third grader ;)

My middle schooler has the same lunch as his brother but I added a Lunchbox Love Card from the Teen & Tween edition. I love Lunchbox Love Cards as you know and these are perfect for an older child. 

Happy Friday and Have a nice and safe weekend!

Things I used to make lunch (contains affiliate links):