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 :)

Pickle's Minion Birthday Bento & Party

My little Pickle is 10! He asked for a Despicable Me Minions pool party. Having had Mia Bella's birthday party at the community pool just a few months ago, I knew we couldn't really decorate, and the kids would want to spend the whole time in the pool so no snacks or games were needed. I got blue & yellow balloons & Minion partyware & favours from Whidbey Party Store, a Minion cake & a big jug of lemonade. Pool parties are easy peasy lemon squeezy :)

We had the party the day before his birthday, so I recycled one of the cake toppers in his school lunch the next day.

I was in a total rush (what else is new) so was super thankful for my Lunch Punch birthday cake sandwich cutter! I did take a few seconds to sprinkle some yellow & blue sanding sugar on his yogurt. And tucked under the oatmeal cookie is a pouch of Minion gummy fruits snacks left over from the goody bag treats. The goody bags also held a Minion bubble soap, Minion bouncy ball, mini Play-Doh, lollipop, & Minion tattoos.

   

In the tiny party room the Minion tablecloth, partyware, & balloons were all that was needed - because bonus, the pool was already all blue & yellow :)

I didn't even notice until after the fact that the Minion cake had a swimming theme too! I honestly didn't look closely at the design in the bakery catalog, it was the only Minion cake so that was it:

Pickle noticed though, and he loved it. His favourite thing to do in the pool was float & paddle around in an inner tube :)

That's Beanstalk peeking out of the other inner tube above, and below, Sprout floats past Pickle and his pals.  Everybody had a great time!

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Click a pic to buy some of the Minion partyware & stuff that we used: