Do you Bento?

Since the girls started back at daycare/preschool this week it includes an element that I was dreading...the packing of the lunches. Now three days a week I have to pack four lunches a night! Uggg. So I started searching the internet for some kind of creative (and healthy) lunch ideas for the girls. I ran across several blogs that featured a type of lunch packing called Bento...It's from Japan and it means "take from home" And I think its mostly because the lunch boxes are called Bento Box's.

Anyway, these bloggers post pictures daily of what they packed for thier kids for lunch. Ahhh...it was like instant ideas for lunch! All of the sudden I was very excited about packing lunches! I started out with what I had. The first fun-ish thing I did was pretty quirky but they LOVED it. I just put pretzel sticks in fruit and called them pretzel popcicles. (It worked better for lunches at home since the pretzel's got soggy by lunch time at school...but live and learn!)

So I searched some more to find some cheap Bento "accessories" to make lunches fun and I ordered a few little things. The box came today and I made breakfast with a few things. Isabelle already asked me "Mom, when do I go to school again?" She's so excited to eat her bento!
Please excuse the bad picture...our camera is on the fritz and this is from my pohone. On the far left are kabob sticks you can use for fruit, veggies, cheese anything...usually cut into fun shapes with a cookie cutter. In the upper left are two egg shapers. You put a warm boiled egg in there, let it cool and it takes on the shape of the eggs. Next to those are little "forks" you can put into food for the kids to eat with, above that is a rice shapper. Great for us since we eat a lot of rice! Below the forms are little tiny sauce containers. Great for ketchup or veggie dip. We LOVE the little monkey ones...that come with little itty bitty spoons inside. Below those are two kinds of silicon cups that are good for keeping food seperate in the bento box. On the right are two ento boxes with bento straps to keep them secure. Can you see the girls hoovering over the new little things? They are pumped for lunch! And these little things were pretty inexpensive, mostly $2 per set.

I put some links on the right if you are interested in checking out the Bento Blogs I have been lurking around.