Just 6 days into the new school term and busy mums are already suffering from Lunchbox Fatigue. So what are the top tips for avoiding Lunchbox Fatigue?
What can we do to avoid this and keep packing FUN lunchboxes?
Top Tips for Avoiding Lunchbox Fatigue
Here are our top tips, for helping you make lunchboxes exciting:
1 Take inspiration from Japanese Bento boxes
One of our favourite Bento blogs is BentonBetterLunches, a site that is full of fresh inspiration. (We have tried to link to this blog but it seems to no longer exist.) The tip is to make food look fantastic, so the kids don’t realise it’s actually healthy too! You can even use little silicone cupcake holders to put chopped up fruit and veg in to help make it look pretty!
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| Photo courtesy of BentonBetterLunches.com |
Another hot favourite for us here in the UK is the lovely Grace with her Eats Amazing site – fun food for kids that’s really quick and easy to prepare but lots of fun. If you haven’t checked her out, you really must!
2 Include pens, colours and paper so your child can draw their lunch. You could even award them a special sticker for an empty lunch box and a beautiful picture!
3 Get kids to decorate their lunch box, and make it personal to them, so 1) it’s easy for them to locate it at lunchtime in school and 2) it will make them feel more involved in their lunch. You can peel off the stickers weekly or fortnightly and change the design! FUN!
4 Hide a treat under the “boring” food, although the skill is not to present it as “boring”. Then it’s a FUN surprise for them to discover!
5 Write a little note or joke and include that in their lunch. There’s a lovely company in America called Lunchbox Love that sell these lunch box notes, so you can either buy them, I believe you can download them, or, if you’ve the time, create your own!
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| Photo Courtesy of Lunchbox Love |
6 Make your lunch together – let the kids help make lunch so they feel all grown up. Involve them!
7 Cut sandwiches into FUN shapes with a cookie cutter
Bread is so much more fun this way. Now our top tip for avoiding that uneven edge, is to lightly use a rolling pin, once the sandwich is assembled. You then get a really clean finish when you use the cookie cutter. Try it and see how you get on. There are over 101 ways with a cookie cutter and a sandwich so do check back as we continue to grow our fun lunch box ideas section.
There are so many different cutters out there, you can theme it, vary it! After all, what are we always saying? We are here to help YOU put the FUN back into packed lunches!
8 Tell your child some fun facts about fruit and veg, so it’s more appealing for them to eat it. eg Carrots help you see in the dark.
9 Grow your own – we tried it with our veggie patch here. Encourage kids to plant and grow your own fruit and veg for lunch so they take a real pride in what they eat. That sense of satisfaction and achievement can be huge!
10 Make sure everything in their lunchbox is a different colour – we’re doing our Lunchbox Colours of the Rainbow here. This will encourage them to try everything as it looks so special!
So here are our tips for making packed lunch FUN but what are your tips?
Why not have your say
We love hearing from you!
The Lunchbox Lady x
Also a special thank you Cheestrings for conducting the research for Lunchbox Fatigue and for sharing the research results with us.
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