Day One - My First Try

With school beginning this week, and being determined to have my daughter be the 'girl with the coolest lunches' I decided that I would do a bento box three times per week. Sounds ambitious right? It's good to have goals ;)

Hilary and I sat down and made a list of things she liked. The list went:

Fruit: apples, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, grapes, pears, and melons
Vegetables: carrots, broccoli, celery, cucumbers, and peppers
Meats: Meatballs (how in the world am I going to incorporate this?), chicken fingers (cold??), ham, turkey, and kielbasa
Breads: bagels, muffins, tortillas, pitas, pizza, and sandwiches (the last two of which are not technically just a bread but it needed to go somewhere on the list)
Dairy: hard boiled eggs, cheese and cheese strings, and yogurt
The extras were: smoothies, teddy grahams, granola bars, fruit snacks, cookies, and goldfish

Great. I have a starting point!

After much viewing of other creative mom's bento box pictures (I highly recommend http://bentolunch.blogspot.com/ - it gave me so many ideas), I came up with my first bento box creation. VOILA!



Not too bad for a first try I think! Hilary had a cinnamon-raisin bagel with strawberry cream cheese, a babybel cheese, ham deli meat on a toothpick (time to buy some fancy-shmancy supplies), cut up strawberry and grapes, animal crackers and fruit snacks.

I suppose I could've filled up the spaces a bit more to make it 'prettier' but Hilary has a pretty small appetite to begin with, so I thought I was pushing my luck as it was. But I can happily report that Hilary returned home with everything eaten but a few grapes...which I suspect she doesn't really care for all that much anyway. How stoked was I that my daughter finally ate a lunch that contains all of the major food groups? Really stoked!! And...this is that part that made my day (that's right, I really am a geek)...after school Hilary was raving about the bento box, in particular the cinnamon-raisin bagel with strawberry cream cheese ("mom, I didn't even know you bought that!"), and she said "mom, I really like my bento box. Can you surprise me with stuff in it all the time?"

YAY!! A bento school day lunch success :D