Catching Up: Kindergarten Lunches and Snacks Days Thirteen-Seventeen

Lizards were the theme for the thirteenth lunch. My daughter’s class was covering the letter L that day and she loves lizards so I used a few clip art images of lizards to make some picks for this lunch. On the left side of this Sistema box, I packed an orange pepper, red raspberries, two peanut butter crackers, carrots and some scraps of pepper strips (more about those in a second). The right side held deli turkey rolled up and secured with picks, cherry tomatoes, cucumber slices, ad sugar snap peas.

I had traced a pattern of a lizard onto a pepper grown by my daughter’s PawPaw. The pepper was red with a little mottled green color remaining and I thought it would be perfect for creating a lizard for this lunch. I painstakingly cut the lizard from the pepper using kitchen shears, then my daughter entered the kitchen. She said, “I smell something alicious” (her way of saying delicious – hence the name of this blog). She then plucked the pepper lizard from my hand and crunched right into it. So much for my perfect edible lizard! At least she enjoyed it.

 Snack that day was simple, but pretty. She had a cheddar cheese letter L, red raspberries, and letter L Cheez-Its. Luckily, the L crackers were easier to find than the Ks.

M was the letter for the fourteenth day so I settled on a monkey theme for that day. In the Sistema box, she had a peanut butter sandwich decorated to look like a monkey with candy eyes and mini Vanilla Wafers. She also had Goldfish, sunflower seeds in the yellow container, grapes on picks, blueberries, a small orange pepper, cherry tomatoes, sugar snap peas, and a little Andes mint tucked in the back. I made the monkey picks with stickers.

This lunch was packed with a monkey napkin and a lunch note I made from one of my daughter’s favorite books: Hug by Jez Alborough.

My daughter’s class has been learning about the life cycle of butterflies and I have a new set of butterfly cutters, so butterflies were the theme for this snack. I used the cutters to make butterflies from honeydew and cantaloupe. I also cut butterflies from cheddar cheese. Pretzels were used to hold everything in place and sunflower seeds were in the small green container. These cutters are a great deal in my opinion and I think they will be useful for a lot of different lunches and snacks.

Letter N was the letter of the fifteenth day and I had planned making a lunch focused around nests: baby chicks in nests, pteradactyls in nests, snake eggs in nests, etc., but I unexpectedly had to attend a meeting late into the evening. So, there was no time for making nests.

Instead, she had nectarine slices (hey that starts with the letter N), almonds in the blue container, pretzels, a mini Andes mint, tomatoes, a pepper, carrots, cucumber slices, a slice of cheese, and ham.

I packed a snack even though this was ice cream day because the school has been running out of ice cream and my husband wanted to make sure she would have something on hand just in case there wasn’t enough ice cream for her class. I packed an applesauce pouch, a Milano cookie, grapes on bear picks, and “little” Frosted Mini Wheats. They ended up having enough ice cream so she ate this later in the evening.

This week began with the letter O. So, I packed two letter O peanut butter sandwiches (stacked), letter O Cheez-Its, letter O gummies, peanuts in the pink container, and a few Little Honey Graham crackers. The bottom half of the box held mini dill pickles, grapes, blackberries, carrots, cherry tomatoes, and celery. She had an accident with this lunch and everything in the bottom half ended up on the cafeteria floor. It seemed like she didn’t get too worried about it though because another kid helped her pick everything up.

Luckily, I had packed a larger than usual snack on the day of that lunch spill. She had two mini berry muffins, pretzels, blueberries, and almonds.

Finally, on Patriot Day, she had a flag-themed lunch. She had a flag-shaped peanut butter sandwich decorated with food safe markers, a few mini animal crackers, a few pretzel Goldfish, and three white butter mints tucked behind the flag. The bottom tier held another flag made of nectarine slices and blackberries. She also had cheddar cheese on homemade star picks, cucumber slices, tomatoes, celery, and carrots. This was packed in our Lego bento box, which I purchased last year from JList. It is a 2×4 block, but Amazon has a similar 2×2 block for sale. Both are stacking bento boxes and are easy for my daughter to open:

Snack was a little of this and that put together quickly late at night since I had another evening meeting. In a single tier of a small bento box, she had cheddar Goldfish, almonds, a few Apple Jacks, a mini ice cream cone filled with Tom and Jerry gummy snacks, and a Milano cookie decorated with a letter N. As you can tell by the very poor lighting, this was packed and photographed LATE at night. Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke to the realization that today’s letter is P, not N, and I made a note to pull that N off the cookie before putting the snack in her back pack this morning. But, I forgot to take it off and I expect to hear about it from my daughter soon :).