Canada Day Bentos, Eh!

Happy Birthday Canada! Though my family won't be attending any Canada Day festivities today, we'll still be celebrating, just as we've done every other year we haven't been able to be in Canada on the 1st. Here are my sproutlets celebrating at home, back when there were only 4 :

This year we've got some Canada flag temporary tattoos, little flags to wave, Bob & Doug McKenzie's The Great White North  to listen to, and Canada Day bentos for lunch. Here's Sprout's:

She has red & white goldfish crackers (I just ate all the blues from a handful of Liberty Goldfish), a heart-shaped egg, strawberries, ham on a maple leaf pick, mozzarella cheese embellished with food colouring marker, & baby carrots. Here is Sprout her first Canada Day:

You can't tell in the pic, but Sprout's egg heart is hollow. She doesn't like the yolk these days, so I cut it in half, removed it (washed every trace out!) and put it back together :)

Pickle had a Canada flag peanut butter sandwich Friday, I'll make that for him again, if he wants. Here's Pickle playing with a Canada flag on July 1st 2008:

Birdie has a Canada love bento too, in our LunchBots Quad:

Lots of red, white & hearts. Strawberry hearts are easy to make by cutting a notch when removing the stem. Egg hearts are a cinch with an egg mold, or, there's a DIY tutorial here if you like a challenge. Baby carrot hearts on a skewer are made by cutting diagonally then flipping one over (step by step here). Canada is written on the cheese with food coloring markers.

Bella and Beanstalk want grilled hot dogs for lunch. Hopefully the rain that was forecast stays away and Sailor Boy will make them some. Grilled is the only way they like hot dogs.

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If we were spending the holiday in Canada, we would be heading out to watch the parade this morning. We make quite a production of it when we go :)

Happy Canada Day!

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More Canada Day bentos:

 

ReUsable DIY Cupcake Toppers!

Beanstalk came up with the design for his birthday cake all by himself. He wanted a small cake with an Avengers "A",  surrounded by cupcakes, one for each Avenger. Cake decorating is not my forté, but I did my best, and came up with a new way to make DIY cupcake toppers in the process!

As I've said, I'm not much of an artist, and especially not with frosting, so I wanted to do cupcake toppers. I've made them before, for Pickle's Dr. Seuss Birthday, but they were paper, so not washable and reusable. If I made Avengers ones, I wanted to be able to use them again in his bentos - so I came up with the idea to make them somewhat like plastic plant labels, using the laminator we bought for Pickle's PECS! 

This photo was taken after the cupcake toppers had been washed and dried. They really are washable and reusable, yay!

How I made my laminated cupcake toppers:

I snagged the Avengers promo poster images from Google (probably breaking some copyright law but since I'm not selling or profiting from them I hope whatever authorities enforce that sort of thing will let it slide). I printed 2 of each image on card stock, cut them up and glued them together back to back, and arranged them between the sheets of laminating plastic.

(I put a sheet of tissue paper down on the table to keep any crumbs or dust from getting on anything - that's what the crumpled red background is.) Sorry, no pic of the laminating process, I needed both hands to keep the small sproutlets from messing with the hot laminator.  Here is the laminated sheet.

Next I cut them out in little stake shapes. 

Easy-peasy! If you have a laminator :)

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Here are my Avengers cupcakes and toppers, ready to assemble!

And, Avengers cupcakes, assembled! Heheh

I had more cupcakes than Avengers and couldn't find pics I liked of all of them solo, but I had everyone represented, even the director of S.H.I.E.L.D. So we had Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow, Nick Fury, Captain America, Hulk & Hawkeye, and 2 of the group. We had Avengers plates, cups, and cupcakes - now all we needed was the cake for the center!

I baked the cake in a loaf pan so I could cut it in half and stack it to make a cube. Here is my somewhat messy but recognizable enough Avengers "A" symbol - I was pretty pleased with how it came out!

Probably not exactly as he imagined, but pretty cool nonetheless.

Beanstalk was pleased :)

This is the only photo I got of him with his cake that didn't have other people's children in it. It's right before he blew out the candle, and that's the only time I took pictures. I always forget to take pictures during parties! Too busy participating... Oh well, I suppose I'd rather he have memories of me actually being part of things than have photos of the party without me in them :)

Happy 11th Birthday Beanstalk!

It's a Patriotic Bento Blog Hop!

Today's post is part of a patriotic blog hop! 
Beanstalk, Bella, Birdie & Sprout all have red, white & blue lunches in celebration of Independence Day, but since I've already done an American flag sandwich for my Pickle this year, and I'm Canadian, I decided to make him a Canada flag sandwich in honour of Canada's Birthday (July 1st)

His flag is a peanut butter sandwich, and on the side he has red & white marshmallow stars, and the bits of the sandwich cut out for the flag, skewered on maple leaf picks, and yogurt topped with red frozen yogurt stars. 

Happy (early) Canada Day Pickle!

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My Bella selected everything that went into her stars & stripes bento.

She has an EasyLunchbox packed with a star-shaped peanut butter sandwich, tomatoes, NatureBox Zingy Currants, Fig Newtons, and Gala apple slices. I added the marshmallow stars as a treat.

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Beanstalk has his 4th of July food in a stainless steel LunchBots Quad.

He has a flag made of blueberries topped with cheese stars & a striped Gala apple, red, white & blue Goldfish, ham & the rest of the mozzarella string cheese used for the stars.

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Birdie and Sprout got Lock & Lock bentos.

Birdie has blueberries and mozzarella on heart picks, strawberries topped with a frozen yogurt star, a star-shaped hard-cooked egg, and red, white & blue Goldfish, topped with USA cookies.

Sprout has her yogurt stars atop some blueberries, cheese stars atop strawberries, and the bottom half the same as Birdie :)

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For afternoon snack yesterday, Beanstalk enjoyed red, white & blue organic naturally colored corn chips, served in a miniature Weber Grill! Hahahaha!

Now hop on over and to What's for Lunch at Our House and see what Shannon has made!

Some containers used for these lunches:

Smile, it's lunch time!

Bella requested a smile for lunch today. She chose what went into her EasyLunchbox, I just put it together :)

She has a peanut butter sandwich with a tomato & cheese smiley face, broccoli hair, & "SMILE" spelled out with alphabet food picks. On the side she has more tomatoes & cheese,  grapes, & Fig Newtons.

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Sprout wanted a smiley face too, but had snacked on a bunch of fruit not long before lunch so she only had the PB sandwich with cheese face:

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Birdie asked for a birthday cake peanut butter sandwich, and got the Lunch Punch from the drawer herself.  She ate lunch out on the picnic table. I love her little sandwiches sandals and wish they came in my size! (heheh, I guess I had sandwiches on the brain!)

Here she is singing Happy Birthday to herself. 

(It's not her birthday).

She looks so much older than 3 to me here!

Stuff used for these lunches:

Look, it's a Sailboat!

My lack of nautical knowledge is probably pretty obvious with these, but they were sailboat-ish enough for my Pickle :)

2 sandwiches - a circle & a square, cut in half.

Very simple to make with swizzle sticks!

If you're fluent in movie quotes, maybe you caught my Mallrats reference in the title, and if you did, chances are you're a Kevin Smith fan, and if you are, you won't want to miss out on the awesomeness of Kevin Smith Week from my friend Karen of What's in Mom's Lunch Bag!