That’s right, Princess starts Kindergarten in less than a week. Ah!!!! My baby is growing up.
We made out pretty well on the school shopping. I pretty much have all the clothes I could need for her already from my extensive thrift store shopping in the past (I have at least the next two sizes taken care of!) and a small bout of outlet mall shopping last spring. Her school supply list was very manageable-2 boxes of tissues, a bunch of glue sticks, a pencil box, some pencils, 2 boxes of crayons and a pair of scissors.
I did got a bit wild on the lunchbox shopping spree. I already had a nice old navy soft sided lunchbox I bought at a yard sale this summer. Then I bought her a thermos shaped like a red crayon, and the short hot food thermos that matches it, both of which were items I had been planning on purchasing. Then she asked for the matching box to put your sandwiches in-I had been planning on using baggies, but she just looked so cute smiling up at me that I caved. Next I sucumbed to impulse and bought her a combination milk and cereal container for her breakfast at school. All of these items are very useful, washable and reuseable, so I suppose it is actually better and cheaper than using plastic baggies all the time.
The school system here offers breakfast and lunch each day. I guess that breakfast has become standard across the country these days-for lower income families it is a great subsidized program, but my intent is to send Princess in with both-both because it should be cheaper than paying for it and because I think it will be much healthier. She will most likely eat a breakfast at home and then eat a breakfast “snack” at school when the other kids eat breakfast. I do plan on letting her choose an occasional hot lunch that she likes and purchasing it for her, I always wanted the pizza on pizza day at my school growing up 🙂
So to plan for her school lunches I first reviewed the two excellent articles on Hillbilly Housewife-Lunch Box Basics and Lunch Box Food. Basically she discusses what nutritionally should be in a lunch, the different ways to pack a lunch to keep things cold or hot and some suggestions of what you can put in. They are very well written and informative articles.
A few of her tips: If you prewarm the short, fat wide mouth thermos for about 5 min with your hottest tap water and then fill it with food that has been heated in the microwave, it will stay hot until lunchtime. This opens up room for lots of leftovers etc. Also, you can preheat a regular thermos, then dump out the water and place a hot burrito wrapped in tinfoil in it and it will stay warm too.
Next I sat Princess down and drew up a list of foods that she likes to eat. I told her that if she agreed with me that a food was something that she liked, then she is not allowed to complain about it when it ends up in her lunchbox. 🙂 Here is the list we came up with:
So, in theory I should be able to chose one thing from each section and have a lunch she will like. Pretty much everything on there can be homemade. My thought is that I will use some small 4 oz containers that I bought and make up some jello and pudding that I can then just grab out of the fridge. I’ll make and freeze some cookies and brownies for convenience, as well as some burritos and quesadillas for those days when I’m in a rush.
We will see how it goes!
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This article was edited to add in the Hillbilly Housewife links.
Sounds like a great plan. AND nice to have her participate in her own lunch choice process. I remember the good ol’ days of saltines and peanut butter for our lunch snack (Oh, boy how I wanted a fruit roll up). She mush be getting really excited to start Kindergarten especially with all the supplies bought!
Can’t wait to hear the updates about how school is going 🙂
I remember growing up, my mom never made us lunches. In fact, we often didn’t have bread, and had to bring PB and crackers as lunch…the humanity!
Yes, I remember coveting others fruit roll-ups too.
Great post! We’ve decided to do the school lunch thing because I’m not sure I can make it much cheaper, and I have to leave for work quite early in the morning and we’re just not organized enough. However, I’m seriously starting to wonder about food quality and nutrition. I know our district is working so hard to provide nutritious meals, but at times I can’t tell…Either way, I worry about the kids actually eating their food–from school or home.
Oh, she’s going to have so much fun! Give her a kiss for me on her first day, okay?
Sometimes my kids brought lunches when they were little, but as time went on it was just easier to get a weekly lunch ticket. The meals are good, and so reasonably priced it was cheaper that way. But I remember having fun packing neat lunches for them. (Once, I put little notes in their lunch boxes. Katherine liked it. Michael said, “Mom, it was nice, but don’t do it again. All my friends made fun of me.”)
Amanda & Ted-hmmm, I seem to have blocked the no bread thing. . . .or maybe mom just didn’t love you guys enough to have bread, but had it for me 🙂 I do remember somehow being coerced into making Amy’s sandwich every day when she was in hs and I was in Jr. High,until the day she found a hair in her sandwich (it was an accident, honest!)
HappyChyck-I’m sort of concerned about the quality of the meals and the actual quantity of food. My kids can be big eaters. Anyway, I’ll be paying attention to what they are serving up there and may decide later that life is easier if we buy, but for now I’m trying homemade. I have a girlfriend who went up to school 2 years ago to check on her kindergarteners and found that they were having mozerrella cheese sticks, frenchfries and corn for lunch. Not my idea of balanced nutrition.
M2F-I’ll give her your kiss 🙂 She is just so excited about the whole thing.