Blossoms & Bears

I made Sprout & Birdie blossom lunches the other day. I think these are my favourite plate lunches I've made so far! I had the idea to make apple blossoms when I accidentally sliced the apple the wrong way :)

I cut the apple rings with a flower shaped cookie cutter, added grapes to the centres, celery slices for leaves, and used a small vegetable cutter to make carrot flowers. The blossom egg was made with a smallish egg in a star egg mold (they are meant for jumbo eggs). The grilled cheese flower was made by grilling the bottom piece with cheese on it open-faced,  the top piece with the centre cut-out on it's own,  then putting the sandwich together after grilling.

 I love how they turned out, and the little girls loved eating them ✿

They look great on the Healthy Habit plates, and fit the food groups perfectly!

Don't miss my Super Healthy Kids Healthy Habits plate giveaway for a chance to win your own Healthy Habits kids plate!

This Nibble Tray snack should have been part of my Teddy Bear Picnic post, but I forgot to include it. It's so cute I had to share it anyways:

Bumblebee food picks hover over the broccoli woods, while teddy bears made of cheddar cheese, carrot, apple, and chocolate graham cracker wait to be dunked in a blue-coloured plain yogurt pond. Well, maybe not the cheese bears... no, the cheese bears don't want to be dunked in the yogurt...
I'm pretty sure they weren't ;)

Some stuff I used for this lunch & snack:


Links to more stuff I use In My Cupboards

Teddy Bear Day, you say?

Yesterday was Teddy Bear Day. I had no idea myself until I saw a facebook post by Lunchbox Fun - and since they are in Australia, it was still the night before for me, and I hadn't made the lunches yet. I was pretty wiped out from all the first day of school stuff though (remember, I have 5 kids at 3 different schools), so while I did have some fun ideas, I had zero desire to put them together. I did have bear shaped cookie cutters though, so they got a peanut butter teddy bear family. And teddy grahams :)

This is Bella's ↑ Besides the bear family, she had rolled up ham secured with a little flower party pick, baby carrots, and cucumber flowers. Beanstalk's was very similar, but I subbed apples for the veggies. And no heart for him. ... Don't the bears and flowers look so cute peeking through the Easylunchbox lid? ↓

 I also threw in a FruitaBü smooshed fruit roll.

Pickle informed me that "we just had bears" (yeah, at least a month ago!) so he didn't want them again. What, no repeats? Great. I put his bears aside for Sprout & Birdie, and packed him some Cheerios and a little bottle of milk instead.

I remembered their lunchbox notes! Yay me :) I used several of the free printable ones from MandyRivers.com. Bella kept hers nice for a bookmark, but Pickle's came home crumpled, crumb-covered and yogurt soaked - and who knows about Beanstalk's - I bet he hid it as soon as he read it, heheh. 

I added some baking sprinkles, stuck on with peanut butter, to Pickle's rejected bears, and made them cute for Birdie & Sprout.

Happy Teddy Bear Day my silly sproutlets!

Berry Beary Nice Try

I had high hopes for this Berry Beary Yummy lunch. They were all going to love it, and think it was both cute and yummy and gobble it all up :) It did look good, they did think it was cute, and some of them thought some of it was yummy... but, there were still some complaints, and some leftovers. I learned a few things ... Lesson #1: I can't please everyone, and with 5 kids, the odds are higher that I won't. Lesson #2: I can cut back on the amount of food. Lesson #3: Cutting sandwiches with cookie cutters wastes a lot of bread (cheese is fine, I can put the scraps in my salad). And that's exactly why I am packing lunches now, before school starts, to work out these kinks :)

So here is what went in my berry and bear themed lunches: Cran-raspberry juice, strawberries, bear shaped peanut butter sandwiches (Beanstalk's is grilled and stamped, didn't quite work out), bear shaped cheese, teddy grahams, strawberry-vanilla yogurt, honey-roasted almonds for Beanstalk who doesn't like yogurt (bears like honey!), a sugar-free strawberry wafer cookie, and 3 gummy strawberries.
Pickle's lunch was already packed in his red bag when I took the photo; he only had teddy bear sandwiches and yogurt, but he had twice as much of each.

Oh, I did find out that with an ice pack in the Built neoprene lunch bags, the contents DO stay cold for at least 3 hours, yay!