We are not quite half way through the year and honestly I am starting to feel a little burnt out of ideas. The kids aren't tired of the food, it's just me. I could easily just keeping rotating through the same dozen or so things until the end of time, and I think they would be ok. But when you're a stay at home mom, you don't have a whole lot of creative outlets, so making the lunches a little creative is sometimes just something I do to entertain myself. I like to keep it interesting. So over the next few weeks I'm going to try to come up with some new ideas, because I'm bored.

I'm sleepy too. Due to a series of events (a flood, and then houseguests), we've had a boy sleeping on a blow-up in our room (squished right up against my side of the bed, because our room is so small that it didn't really fit) for the last 2 weeks. I didn't really mind having him there, but he is my autistic child and he doesn't always sleep well. He wakes up very early, and makes a bit of noise in the night, and I realize that I am suffering from some lack of sleep. He's back in his room now, and I am very much looking forward to catching up a bit on my sleep. Well, as much as one can do with four kids.

I'm sure the sleeplessness affects my creativity, and certainly affects my motivation to get creative. So hopefully I'll perk up with more ideas once I've caught up a little. I also haven't managed to do a proper meal plan in a couple weeks. But next week my husband is back to a full work schedule, which means I'm back to a full schedule of 100% of everything all day for the kids, so I need to get my game on again and get organized. So watch for more updates on meal planning starting next week, more meals made ahead, and back to more organization. I also have gotten a little lazy about making the lunches ahead of time. Knowing that I had help in the morning let me ease off on my night before prep a little. But next week it's back to reality. Oy. I better go to bed.

Anyway, back to the lunches. We had two short weeks of school here, so I've got two short weeks of lunches in one post. I did try a few new things, and a few new arrangements of old things. And I've splurged a few times and bought berries, which I normally don't do in January but I'm just feeling the need for summer flavors. My kids could send us to the poor house with their love of berries though, so I have to treat them as a special treat that I only buy occasionally. Last week the store had pints of berries on sale for 2 for $5 (not organic, but I couldn't help myself), so I bought 2 of each kind they had - strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries. They were all gone by the next day. Otherwise, not a lot of reinventing the wheel here, there are several meals of leftovers, some quesadillas, some of our usual breakfast-for-lunch meals. Ordinary stuff, by our standards. This time of year when I don't splurge on berries our fruits are usually limited to apples, oranges, and bananas, and we're still getting some pears.

Some of our favorite lunch products:

Our lunches are mostly packed in Easy Lunchboxes, which you can get here.
We have some sides and dips in the EasyLunchboxes mini dippers, available here.
The little spoons are like these.
The Thermos containers we use are Funtainers, similar to the ones available here.
I just got some fun little letter picks, available here.
I use this awesome apple corer for my apples and pears.
I use these flat ice packs when I pack and want to keep food cold.

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