Back To School with yubo for my Bigger Boy!

This Back To School lunch I made for Pickle may be the last one of his that I blog! He's decided that now that he's in middle school, he's too old for themed bentos & shaped sandwiches, and wants plain lunches.  But I packed him this one (possibly) last special lunch anyways :)

He has a Babybel cheese with a check mark carved in the wax, Oreos with a chalkboard pick stuck in the frosting of one, yogurt with chocoladehagel (sprinkles), a notebook paper peanut butter sandwich embellished with food markers, stacked atop a second plain sandwich, & a Lunchbox Love note.

Everything pictured plus a drink, napkin, & spork is packed in his new, more grown up, yubo tote. It's less bulky than the yubo lunchbox, but still the perfect size for all the yubo containers, & more:

The yubo ice pack fits perfectly in the new soft-sided Tote, along with the same container combination as can be packed in the hard-sided yubo, as well as additional yubo container(s), accessories and/or a drink.

Something else that's new for middle school is that Pickle doesn't have an aide sitting with him,  encouraging him to eat tidily & helping him pack up when he's finished.  He likes to squish his food - it's an autism/sensory thing - plus he's neither the neatest of eaters, nor very good about remembering to put the lids back on his containers, & frequently brings home a messy lunch bag covered inside & out with smushed Oreo smears & spilled yogurt. So I was pretty thrilled with the ability to completely unsnap the yubo Tote & wipe it down, or even machine wash it. No scrubbing crud out of seams, yay!

I really like that when the yubo tote is completely unsnapped it becomes a placemat. Having a messy kid myself makes me more than a bit squeamish about eating on shared surfaces... who knows what germs are lurking there ready to leap onto my lunch, heheh... so this is a great feature for me :)

See all the lunchboxes & accessories yubo has to offer at getyubo.com

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Just in case anyone's wondering about the bottle in Pickle's lunch, it's this:

It's called Bot-L, by Fred & Friends, & it's one of his favourites.  I like it well enough - it doesn't leak - but it's not insulated, & I have to hand wash it...
so I don't love it quite as much as Pickle does ;)

Disclosure: I received no monetary compensation for this post. I was offered a complimentary yubo tote to review with no obligation to endorse. This post does contain affiliate links to products I used. All opinions & images are my own. 

Tooth Fairy Lunch & Lunchbox Love Giveaway!

My 7 year old Sydney Bean aka Sprout finally lost her first tooth this week. She was so excited about leaving it in her little velvet pouch for the tooth fairy to find, and so thrilled with the glittery fairy-dust covered bill she received in payment :)  I made her a tooth fairy lunch to celebrate, and packed it in her pink yubo lunchbox with the fairy faceplate:

She has a tooth fairy peanut butter & Nutella sandwich made with a Lunch Punch, embellished with cupcake sprinkles & surrounded by mini marshmallow teeth, raspberries with a tooth pick, and strawberries with a wand pick. And a Lunchbox Love note with a fun fact about teeth :)

We Love Lunchbox Love!

I love including a Lunchbox Love note with my sproutlets' lunches. Sometimes I choose a note for it's positive or encouraging words, sometimes for the fun fact or joke ... Whether it's a special theme or just lunch, I can always find the perfect Lunchbox Love note. And they love getting them!

Lunchbox Love for You!

Lunchbox Love has generously offered me an opportunity to share some Love with one lucky reader! You could win 4 volumes of Lunchbox Love for Kids (your choice),  plus either Lunchbox Love for Christmas or Lunchbox Love for Hannukah (for next year!) and a set of Lunchbox Love Valentine's Day cards (for sharing with classmates & friends!)

Enter the Giveaway!

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Good Luck!

yubo Shark Tank bento & giveaway!

In anticipation of yubo's upcoming appearance on ABC's Shark Tank Friday night, my friend Nina of Mamabelly's Lunches With Love & I are pleased to be hosting a giveaway for a personalized shark yubo lunchbox! And, we made shark-themed bentos in our own yubo lunchboxes :)

Sprout's bento is packed in her pink yubo lunchbox. I'd envisoned making her a rectangular (tank-shaped) sandwich with a shark shape cut out of it, and silver sugar sprinkles in the cut-out, like fairy bread, but my shark cookie cutter was bigger than I remembered - or the bread was smaller - either way, it didn't work out. Instead, I made simple shark-shaped sandwiches. The oval yubo container is the tank! And I ate the scraps :)

Goldfish crackers had to be included since I had the perfect Lunchbox Love card for them (you'll see).  Blue cotton candy Trix yogurt was perfect for the shark sprinkles to circle in. I had Tiger & Hammerhead shark cupcake picks, so I stuck them in some string cheese & apple cut in triangles - shark teeth!

Before I snapped the lid on, I tucked in some shark gummy fruit snacks, a spoon for the yogurt, & the aforementioned Lunchbox Love note :

No, I did not know that "Jaws" is the most common name for a goldfish :)

I was also going to make a lunch similar to one I made for Shark Week, but it was pancake day at school and I only needed to pack one lunch. So in case you were too busy watching Shark Week on TV to read my blog and missed it, and because I love how it turned out, here's the original lunch I'm referring to:

Another reason for re-sharing that lunch is because it's in a green yubo, and if you enter the giveaway you'll find out why :)

Yeah! Here's where you enter! It's easy :) If you've already been to Mambelly's Lunches With Love and seen her shark bentos, go ahead and enter via the Rafflecopter widget below. If you haven't seen her post yet,  go there now. You can enter on either page, it doesn't matter which, and you only have to enter once, it'll register on both blogs.

The giveaway is for one deluxe PERSONALIZED Sharks! yubo lunchbox!
Thank you, yubo, for generously sponsoring this giveaway!  
THIS IS A FLASH GIVEAWAY so you only have 3 DAYS to enter!

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Good Luck! And don't forget to watch yubo on Shark Tank, this Friday, November 22nd, on ABC!

Frightful Fall Blog Hop - Skeletons & Spiders!

I just love Pickle's bones lunch! It's not easy to make the same old peanut butter sandwich & yogurt fun, but I think this is, and I had fun with it:

He has his usual PB sammy, cut with a skeleton & bones cookie cutters, mozzarella string cheese cut up and pierced with an R.I.P. pick, and yogurt topped with a drizzle of strawberry syrup & a scattering of sugar bones, packed in his personalized yubo lunchbox. I even found a skeleton joke Lunchbox Love note in our Hallowe'en volume :)

If you saw my earlier post, did you guess what was wrong with Bella's bento? 

It's not the food... She has blue corn tortilla chips, salsa (made by her friend Paige's mom), cantaloupe, mozzarella string cheese, sunburst tomatoes, & baby carrots. And it's not the theme... She has a bento box full of spiders... 

No, it was that I had forgotten I'd need to put a lid on the salsa! And when I did that, I couldn't close the lid of the Laptop Lunches bento box! But, it was an easy fix, I just needed to do a little swapping around of containers :)

I'm not supposed to make cute lunches for 7th grader Beanstalk anymore. So he just has some stuff he likes: fruit , crackers, & Clif bar. The fact that the colours are Hallowe'eny is purely happy coincidence :)

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Now hop over to Bento for Kidlet and see what my buddy Jenn managed to scare up for her Kidlet's lunch!

Shark Week! in yubo lunch box :)

Hooray, it be Shark Week! The sproutlets are loving all the shark specials on Discovery Channel this week. And I had grand plans to make shark-themed lunches all week... but don't hold your breath waiting for that to actually happen - especially since I already missed yesterday ;) I did make shark sandwiches for lunch today though! Pictured is 6 year old Sprout's, in her yubo lunchbox:

Sprout's peanut butter sandwich shark looks ready to jump out of a jumbo silicone cup.  Strawberries & carrots fill the rest of the large yubo container. The small containers above hold berry blue gelatin topped with a gummy shark, and greek yogurt tinted blue and topped with shark sprinkles. I bought extra yubo containers so I could pre-fill a bunch and store them in the fridge, ready to grab & go, and I chilled the whole batch of gelatin right in those.

I used a couple of the shark sprinkles to make the shark's eyes,  and cut the mouth out with a tiny triangle cutter, over & over. The open-mouthed shark sandwich design came from this Jaws Bento by Sakurako Kitsa. 

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Stars & Stars Revisited

School's out for summer, no need to pack lunches this week! I still have lunches I photographed but never blogged though :) Here's an end of the school year lunch for my kindergarten star Sprout's 2nd to last day:

Raspberries with a congratulatory cupcake pick, carrots, cheddar "gold stars", & graham crackers, packed in her yubo lunchbox, with a Goodbyn bottle.

Here are a couple more star lunches, from back in March:

Birdie's Yumbox contains cherry yogurt with star sprinkles, watermelon, carrots, cucumber slices embedded with carrots stars, whole grain cheese crackers, an egg a couple of yogurt-covered cookie stars, and I can't remember what was in the little shooting star box :)

Birdie didn't eat the cucumbers & carrots, so I reused them in Bella's EasyLunchbox the next day:

She had a turkey, cheddar & white cheddar flatbread sandwich, dried strawberries& fig newtons, and Bidie's leftover veggies.

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Some of the stuff used to make these lunches:

And the containers they're packed in:

I Love You To Pieces :)

Today is the last day of April, which has been Autism Awareness Month,  so I made my Pickle a puzzle sandwich with our beloved Lunch Punch Match & Munch cutters. When I serve him a puzzle sandwich at home I tell him I love him to pieces; I hope thinks of that when he gets one at school ♥

Sometimes I do mess them up though... like today... I left some of the puzzle tabs in the cutter! Too much peanut butter, bread too soft, in too much of a hurry? Who knows... and Pickle won't care! After all, perfect pieces don't taste any better than messy ones :)

Pickle also has yogurt with multicoloured star sprinkles, and an oatmeal cookie cut in quarters to fit the yubo cup. He'll like that, he'll count it as a puzzle, like he did when he did the same thing :)

Pickle's lunch was made with this stuff:

Cute & hasty, plain but tasty :)

Bella's lunch has a few cute details inspired by the faceplate of her yubo lunchbox - blossom & star bento picks through the cheese & tomatoes, and silicone cups that match the fairies' colours separating them from the carrots & cucumbers. A fairy sticker decorates the bottom of her jell-o cup :) This was a hastily made lunch with nothing particularly creative about it yet all 3 girls oohed when they saw it ♥

To make up for amping up the cute factor on Beanstalk's Earth Day lunch, I kept the next one plain & simple. He asked for apples & a Clif bar in his Laptop Lunch and I added Veggie Sticks & grapes. "Don't make it cute!" he reminded me grumpily, and just for that I added a Lunchbox Love note :)

Pickle's peanut butter sandwich was going to be a tic tac toe, before I realized that would mean nothing to him since he's not familiar with the game! He likes squares though, so I'm sure he was happy enough with it as is.

Some stuff used for these lunches: