Kids Cuisine

I am the proud mother of two children in preschool.  It’s an exciting feeling -– seeing them both march up the little steps to school in the morning.  I’ve been waiting for this day since, oh, about a week or two after they were born.

As excited as I am about this new milestone, I’ve realized I’m facing  a new problem.  On the grand scale of things, it’s not a biggie.  The world definitely has larger issues to be worried about.   But if you are an organizer, like me, I know you may have worried about this too.

What do I do with the lunch stuff?

The lunch stuff is all that paraphernalia that I need every morning to assemble their cute little lunchboxes.  It’s the teeny-tiny little snack containers, or the oversize cups with the straws built in, or the plastic sandwich bags, or the princess mugs or the juice boxes or Lil’ Milk pasteurized containers for their lunch beverages.  It’s the boxes of mini-snack packs, or the truckload of fruit I buy every week.  It’s the bread, the bagels, the sippy cups.  Does it seem odd to have all this stuff?  Do other families face the same storage crisis problem?  I didn’t take all this into consideration when I fell in love with this house we bought four years ago.  I should have held out for more closet space.

And why do I have to send so much food with them to begin with?  They each have two snacks at school -– one in the morning, and one in the afternoon.  On top of that, they also have lunch around 11:30 -12:00, which also requires an additional beverage.  The first day, I found myself packing three beverages for both of them, until I wised up and just put in one water bottle for both snacks.  But really, do they need to eat all day long?

Apart from the packing, containers, and lack of space for this stuff, visually, the sight of it all is so disorienting.  All the little bits come in odd shapes, nothing seems to stack properly, it looks awful if I lay it out on the counter, and nothing ever stays put in the dishwasher.  Little bits of plastic fall off the rack, wind up near the heating element of the machine, and produce a toxic foulness after every cycle. I love the look of a neatly packed bento box, but even those seem to require lots of bitty bits to tuck little things into.

How do you pack your kids’ lunch?  Apart from sandwich bags, what else do you use to contain the food you send?  And most importantly, how do you store this stuff at the end of the day?