Pack Lunches, Not Punches!

Today the Bento Bloggers & Friends are having an anti-bullying blog hop, and I have the honour of hosting a guest post by my friend Lauri of Welcome to the Bensanity.

"This lunch was inspired by two brave young elementary school aged boys who were bullied because they like My Little Pony. One boy was prohibited from bringing his MLP backpack to school by the administration, the other was bullied to the point of attempting suicide.

My own son, at that age, was tormented because of his love of ballet, and more specifically, because of his Rainbow shoelaces. When asked what his favorite color was he would reply "All Colors!"

I would love to see the day when children aren't corralled or taught that they are supposed to like certain colors or activities. People are people and we all have our own individual tastes and we should be honored for our spirit and our kindness. Not the color of our shoelaces or the cartoon on our backpacks."

Directions: 

• Prepare pasta to package specifications. 
• While cooking, prepare 5 Ziploc bags with 20 drops of food coloring and 2 TB of water each. 
• Separate pasta into 5 equal portions and seal in individual bags. Let soak for 1 minute each. 
• Rinse each portion of colored pasta in colander & mix. 

Include a thermos of your favorite topping or sauce to add to your lunch! This lunch has a nice Alfredo Sauce waiting to be added (& a little EasyLunchboxes mini dipper of shredded parmesan cheese)!"

Thank you Lauri, that looks amazing! For more of Lauri's lunches, follow her on Facebook: Welcome to the Bensanity. And follow our blog hop to see more anti-bullying bentos , starting with Licious Lunches :) 

 

Spring Blossoms for Birdie

Birdie got a pretty Spring bento lunch today:

She has a blossom egg (made with the flower egg mold I posted about here) , Spring Ritz crackers, cheese blossoms, and honeydew melon grass. It's not a whole lot of food but remember, she's only a preschooler :)

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 Today is a great day for Birdie & me - she slept all through the night, in her own bed! Yay! You may be thinking, so what, isn't she like 5, what's the big deal? Yes, she is 5, but it's a big deal for us, as she's been waking me up every night since her Dad deployed and I'm tired! But not last night, hooray!

I added a Lunchbox Love note to tell her how proud I am of her :)

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Some stuff I used to make this lunch:

Spring Is Here!

Here's a Happy Spring bento full of blossoms & bugs! A ladybug egg, Spring Ritz crackers,  tomato,  Babybel cheese, raspberries in a dragonfly silicone cup, & Yoplait Go-Gurt, packed in EasyLunchboxes, with Lunchbox Love.

Aren't these flower & critter Spring egg molds cute? 

They come in sets of two - bunny & ladybug, & tulip & blossom.

 

I'm not super keen on how my eggs turned out though, so have sent my set on to a bento blogger friend.  I think the ladybug would have come out nicer if the egg was a little bigger - it didn't fill the mold enough to imprint much detail.

Lunch is cute anyways :)

I sort of made the dragonfly cup...

I cut it from a silicone cake mold pan like this one:

The molds come in many colours - mine was purple. Purple & yellow are such Spring-y colours - like the crocuses & daffodils on our lawn :)

Happy Spring!

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Some stuff I used to make this lunch:

Lucky Rainbow Lunch

"I'm lucky!" Pickle declared this morning. "Why's that?" I asked. "Because I'm one eighth Irish! Nobody can pinch me!" "Better wear a green shirt anyways," I suggested, "in case they can't tell by looking at you." ;)

I made him a special St. Patrick's Day lunch and wished him good luck :

Last night my cold was keeping me awake so I had time to think about how to make Pickle's usual PB sandwich & yogurt more fun than usual, and of course the obvious answer was to colour his yogurt - and I was all set to do just that, colour it green, but since I couldn't sleep, I decided to take a little more time and colour it rainbow instead. I used a medicine syringe:

Pickle's yogurt rainbow took about 15 minutes to make, since I had to wash out the syringe in between each colour, then mix the next colour, but it wasn't hard. And it was fun!  I have no idea if it will look this pretty by the time he eats it though, so I showed it to him before I put the lid on :)

Besides his rainbow yogurt., Pickle has some shamrock peanut butter sandwiches, a mint Oreo, chocolate leprechaun's gold, and a rainbow gummy candy. Yeah, yeah, it's not the healthiest of lunches, but it's a fun one - I'll feed him better at supper ;) And as always, I found the perfect Lunchbox Love card to go with his lunch!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

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Some stuff I used to make this lunch:

Storybook Bento: Pinkalicious!

March is National Reading Month, & Laptop Lunches is celebrating with a month of storybook bentos!  I was so pleased to be asked to contribute :)  I let my girls choose the book they wanted me to make lunch to go with.  They chose Pinkalicious by Victoria & Elizabeth Kann:

Pinkalicious is such a cute book.  The story is about a little girl who eats so many pink cupcakes that she turns completely pink!  She loves it, and cries pink tears of happiness over how beautifully pink she is!  Her mother is not so thrilled with her new hue and takes her to the doctor, who prescribes green foods to return her to her normal colour, but she likes being pink, and sneaks another pink cupcake instead.  She's not happy when it turns her red though, and finally eats her greens.

Pinkalicious is a perennial favourite bedtime story at our house.  It's a silly story filled with fun, colourful illustrations.  My girlies love that the mother in the story quotes the same rhyme I do, "You get what you get and you don't get upset".  And we all love the ending :)

We even have Pinkalicious pajamas! (Purplicious ones too - that's one of the sequels.) Here my 7 year old reads the book to her 5 year old sister:

You can imagine how excited they were about these Pinkalicious cupcakes I made! Cherries aren't in season right now so I topped ours with raspberries:

Yummy! And a perfect fit in the smaller Laptop Lunches inner containers:

My eldest daughter's Pinkalicious Laptop Lunches bento contains:

• A flatbread cheese sandwich - I used scissors to cut it in a crown shape - and a cheddar star-topped wand.
• Strawberry yogurt sprinkled with pink & white sugar crystals.
• One of the Pinkalicious cupcakes
• Greens! Lettuce, celery, cucumber, and broccoli - plus carrot & radish flowers and a butterfly cupcake pick, for the part of the story where the butterflies think the pink girl is a flower :)
• And a Pinkalicious cupcake ring repurposed as a cloth napkin ring, and a spork (not shown above, see below)

My younger girls got similar lunches - with less greens.  One more thing went into each bento box: a Lunchbox Love note card. Bella's says "Dream big!" and has a fun fact about belly button lint on the flip side :)

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Some stuff I used to make our bentos:

Celebrate National Reading Month with Laptop Lunches :)