One of these days I have plans to start blogging about more than just my kids school lunches, but spare time is limited and so this is most of what I do here on the blog right now.  I'm glad that there's so many of you who are interested in seeing these things - keep sharing with your friends, and let me know what else you'd like to know about what I'm doing. 

One of the key things I try to focus on when packing a lunch is to give them some amount of balance.  I don't always manage it, but at least several days out of the week I think I do pretty well at giving them a balanced meal with protein, fruit, veggie, and carb.  Sometimes there's more of one than the others, but over the course of the week I think we balance out ok.  

If you're paying attention and go back and look at the lunch posts, it will seem like I skipped a bunch of weeks.  I did.  But I got weeks 11-15 all caught up in one post last week, so I'm still on track with sharing all our lunches for this year.

The first week of the New Year was all about catching up from the holiday break - putting away new toys and clothes, getting the kitchen back in order, doing laundry - certainly not a time to get fancy with the lunches.  So my goal for the week was to keep it simple, but still make it attractive and something that anyone would want to eat. Also - it's the start of ski season.  Where we live we are only an hour away from the local ski mountain, so some combination of kids will be in lessons every Saturday for the next 2 months. (Sounds exhausting, and it is, but it goes by fast.) So for the next two months I will be packing lunch 6 days a week. 

The holidays really throw my routine out the window.  In November and December the school lunches were made, and the photos were taken, but I didn't get around to blogging them for you.  So here you are, a catch up of several weeks of school lunches. 

Remember, the food itself doesn't have to be anything fancy.  Just take an extra minute to present the meal in a fun way, and it will seem so much more appealing. If you look at the contents of these lunches, most of them do not contain anything really revolutionary, just normal kid lunch stuff presented in an appealing and organized way.  I try to make sure the lunch is balanced with a protein, a fruit and a veggie (although looking back at some of these pics, I see I haven't done so great with the veggie - something to work on in 2015!).

Are you starting to struggle with figuring out what to pack?  My weekly lunch plan really helps me out on days when I'm out of ideas.  I stick to my usual formula of Monday leftovers, Tuesday tortilla, Wednesday breakfast, Thursday lunchable and Friday Sandwich.  It really helps me keep it fresh and not repeat a lunch twice in one week, and I still feel like I have a lot of room for creativity within that framework.  You should give it a try. 

Last week was just four days of school - we had Tuesday off for Veteran's Day.  The kids were all super excited leading up to it. They aren't quite old enough to really understand what the day means, but they were still very excited to wish their older brother, an Iraq and Afghanistan Vet, a happy Veteran's Day. The oldest of mine were just babies when he went on his first deployment, and they couldn't quite understand why there wasn't a cake to celebrate the day. I had to explain more than once that it wasn't a birthday, and in the years to come we will make sure that they learn and understand what his, and every veteran's, service means to us.

Week 10 already!  Halloween has blown by and it's already November.  I can hardly believe it, time moves so fast.  I'm enjoying having my lunch menu each week, which gives me some fall back standard when I'm too tired to figure it out.  But I've also managed to mix it up a bit and try a few new creative things.

With kids and food, we celebrate small victories.  Three of my kids are pretty good eaters (we won't talk about the fourth one!).  They eat a decent variety of foods, but anything resembling leafy and green is where we struggle the most. Pretty much kale chips are it, and aside from that I'm just sneaking it in.

All these lunches (and dinners, and breakfasts, and snacks!) for these kids!  It's a wonder I have time to eat too!  Honestly, I don't always have time - it's often a few bites of what's left on somebody's breakfast plate before I head out door.  Or I roll up a piece of ham to eat in the car on the way to school.  Sometimes I finish their lunches when I pick them up at school.  I know, it's a little sad - but what mom doesn't do this? 'Tis the life I chose!

When I do manage to think ahead enough to pack food for myself too, it sure does make my day easier.  If I know I'm going to be out running around all day I will try to pack something to take along for myself. 

I'm trying really hard to get last week's lunches posted before this week is over!  I'm pleased with myself for the lunches last week, I got a little creative with trying a few slightly different things, but still kept it easy.  What a week! Halloween and parties and school field trips - I needed the weekend to recover.  But then the time changed, and not all my kids have adjusted to that yet.  Ah well, such is the mom life.  I love it anyway.

Another week in the books.  It wasn't our best week ever, we're still fighting that fall school germ season, but we managed to get through it. One of my kids has asthma, so the cold season that makes the rest of us just uncomfortable can hit her pretty hard.  And we had a couple of hard nights.  I'll tell you, making these lunches the night before definitely saved my bacon a couple of days - after being up much of the night with a sick kiddo, there's no way I'd be making lunch in the morning.  My kids would have been stuck with a school cafeteria lunch.

Oh it's been another crazy week here, but then again with 4 kids is there such a thing as a week that's not crazy?  These are our lunches from last week - schedule wise last week was actually pretty normal for this time of year, all four kids healthy and at school.