Best Lunch Boxes for a New School Year
Yesterday we had our last Summer Tuesday Playgroup with my group of friends and their kids. As I’ve mentioned, I’m ready for school to start and have been ready for school to start for most of the month. Today as we said our goodbyes I told Max to tell his friends to have a good first day of kindergarten.
He turned to me and said, ‘But they’ll be there with me right?’ and I think it was the first time he really understood what I’ve been telling him. Even though we’ve been in preschool all together for the last two years and we rode in carpools and had playgroups and playdates and saw each other 3-5 times a week, this year we’re all going our separate ways to different elementary schools.
Then, the impossible happened, I cried because school is starting and life is changing.
This is simply more proof you can’t please me no matter what you do. I cry because school is starting and then I cry because school isn’t starting fast enough. But enough about that, we have lunchboxes to choose.
I’ve got one more year of lunches at home with my little boy and I plan to relish our last year of solo time. We’re going to need a lunchbox for my daughter though.
I’ve been eyeing the Bento Box with great interest for a year now. I love the idea but fear it will only serve to bring into glaring focus my daughter’s finicky eating habits and my uncreative use of whole wheat bread.
The insulated lunch box is quite popular at my daughter’s school. Lunches stay cool, especially if you put a frozen juice box in the bag in the morning. Pottery Barn Kids makes a nice simple version called the Fairfax. My daughter is likely to veto this option as ‘boring’ a lot like that backpack I proposed yesterday. Maybe she wants a lunch box with sparklers and it’s very own monkey. It’s a lunchbox Madison, not a side show act.
Like I’ve mentioned before, I’m not a fan of character items, but like most kids, my kids are big fans of character items. It seems everything is better if it features a cartoon character. This might be a compromise I can live with. A classic metal lunchbox, decorated with stickers of your child’s choosing. Or maybe I just need to ease up a little and buy that My Little Pony box. Or maybe not.
Pirates have universal appeal, so this pirate lunch box would be fun for carrying lunch to school. Also, if you don’t put that frozen juice box inside to keep things cool, it could serve as a warning about the rancid chicken salad sandwich your mom packed for you.
Of course, there’s always the low tech brown paper bag which Teresa suggested yesterday. Easy, customizable and maybe best of all when your child eats two bites of his sandwich and two cookies for lunch it’s between him and the trash can. You don’t even have to know.
