This was a pretty good week for Wyatt’s preschool bento boxes. For some reason he was in the mood to give new foods a chance and he ate a lot of the things I was sending for the first time.
Tuesday I sent peaches, dried blueberries, chicken taquitos and a little thing of salsa to dip the taquitos in. I didn’t have high hopes for this lunch because the taquitos are a new-ish food to Wyatt. He’s only eaten them once before and although he liked them he wasn’t particularly enthused about them. But amazingly, his lunch box came home completely empty. Score one for mom!
I sent taquitos again Wednesday because Wyatt asked for them! I also packed some fantastic bing cherries that Zach had brought home from the farmers market Tuesday night and some buttered alphabet shaped pasta. We’d eaten the pasta the night before with dinner and the novelty of eating pasta shaped like letters was very exciting for Wyatt.
Our neighbors have given Wyatt sandwiches of lunch meat and catsup on flat bread a couple of times and he’s always really enjoyed them. I decided to give it a try myself using turkey, and havarti cheese. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they were an abject failure, but he only ate one of the four wedges so they weren’t exactly a success either. I also sent fresh strawberries with a few frozen blueberries for color.
Friday’s lunch consists of a little container of blueberries and raspberries, turkey roll-ups and some home made zucchini bread. The berries are also from the farmers market and I started worrying that they would go bad before we could eat them all, so I threw them in the freezer the other night. I’m hoping they’ll thaw by lunchtime and also that they won’t be too juicy and messy.
Here are the bento boxes I sent Wyatt to preschool with this week:
I was sick Tuesday morning, so Zach let me sleep in and made Wyatt his very first bento box: banana yogurt, chicken sausage and pretzel thins.
Another chicken sausage on Wednesday, along with strawberries and a little teddy bear shaped onigiri (rice cake). Wyatt had eaten a nice amount of rice at dinner the night before, so I thought he’d like it, but he didn’t even touch it.
Thursday was hot, so I decided to make a refreshing fruit and cheese bento. I put in cantaloupe, strawberries, half a banana and a Laughing Cow cheese wedge. I also added some little corn muffins that I’d made the night before. I was positive that this was one of the all time best lunches I’d ever made, but all he ate was the cheese and strawberries. He did polish off the cantaloupe and banana in the car on the way home but he didn’t even touch the muffins. I think he’s doing it just to spite me. Or maybe he’s on a muffin strike until I make blueberry muffins….
Today I decided to try something new and I made a quesadilla for Wyatt’s lunch. I cut it into circle, star and elephant shapes and put in some salsa for him to dip it in. I’m not sure how the quesadilla will hold up in the cold lunch box — we’ll see. I also put in some cantaloupe and grapes. That cantaloupe is lasting forever and we’re all eating some every day. Sheesh.
I’ve been looking for some crafty, fun ways to be a little greener over the last few months and here is one of my recent projects.
I am super bad about creating and printing Excel documents at work. No matter how careful I am, I frequently insert a bunch of extra rows and columns beyond the area of the spreadsheet I’m actually using so when I print a document it comes out with a bunch of extra pages that only have grid lines on them. I’m working on fixing these ridiculous errors, but recently I printed several copies of a document where I’d royally screwed up and I ended up printing about 200 pages with no actual data on them. Ugh.
I brought the paper home with me and put most of it right onto Wyatt’s coloring shelf so he could use it to create some masterpieces before it got recycled. I reserved a smaller chunk for myself to make a few little notepads. (By the way, I’d like to point out that you don’t have to be an Excel loser to do recycle paper like this — I also bring home other documents that are printed single-sided when I’m tossing stuff from my files at work.)
To make them, I started off by cutting the paper into uniform pieces. The one on the left was 4 x 4 inches. The notepad on the right was made from paper that had been cut into quarters, so it was 4 1/4 x 5 1/2 inches.
I then cut slightly larger pieces of a cardboard package insert to match the size of the printer paper. The package insert I used was from a pack of photo sleeves. I also save the inserts from page protectors, craft supplies, etc. You could even just use a piece of cardboard cut from an Amazon box, cereal box or anything else you can find in your recycling bin that is fairly stiff.
Once I’d cut the cardboard, I decorated it with pretty paper and punches. I kept the one with the boat on it pretty simple because it was for Wyatt and he doesn’t care. I put a little more effort into the the swirly one because it was for my purse.
Once I had everything decorated, I stacked the paper and the covers and put them together with my Bind-It-All machine. Most people won’t have one of those, of course, so other ways you could bind them would be to punch two or three holes through the stack and connect them with binder rings. You could also try threading a string or ribbon through, leaving a little slack and tying very tight knots in them. I bet twist ties would work too and that would be another great way to recycle something.
This photo shows a fanned out version of one of the books looking sort of from the back. You can see the grids lines on the paper.
I keep this notebook in my purse and I use it for making quick grocery lists, mostly. I also whip it out in restaurants and give it to Wyatt to draw on.
Apricots, apple bar, strawberries and a half a leftover burrito. This lunch went over very well. I wasn’t sure if he would eat the burrito because I packed it cold, but he ate everything except the apricots.
Watermelon (it was a very hot day), salami, the last of the blueberry muffins from the freezer and a few Triscuits.
Peanut butter and jelly on white bread, gold fish crackers, apple wedges and a couple of grape tomatoes for color.
Peaches, chunks of white bread, rolled up slices of deli ham and a cheese stick.
This is what downtown Cedar Rapids — where my parents live and where I grew up — looked like yesterday morning. Those straight lines crossing the river are the railings of the bridges. They are completely under water now. The water is expected to crest early this afternoon, so things will get a bit worse before they get any better.
My family is fine — high but only dry in comparison to others in town. Neither they nor any of my other relatives are in any danger of losing their homes. I’m pretty thankful for this.
My hometown however is in bad, bad shape. Most of the downtown is under water up to the roofs or second stories. All the important civic buildings are flooded out: the water is up to the second story of City Hall, police and fire stations are flooded to the roofs. The library is flooded with most of the books still in it. Several museums and a beautiful, historic theater are flooded to the second floor too. The river runs right through the center of town and all of the bridges across it, with the exception of only the freeway, are under water. One of the hospitals was evacuated last night because the water had reached the generator in the basement.
Thousands of people have lost power and the water system is operating at only 25% of capacity. Residents are under orders to use water for drinking only and they expect this order will stay in effect for up to three weeks.
24,000+ people have been evacuated from their homes.
Cedar Rapids is not the only city that has been been effected by the flooding. Iowa City, where my brother lives, is already starting to flood and the river there isn’t expected to crest for another week. (My brother and his family also live far from the flood plane and are safe.) All but 16 of Iowa’s 99 counties have been declared disaster areas.
It’s really devastating.
Please, if you’re inclined to do so, take a moment to think some positive thoughts or send some prayers to the many people who are suffering, who have lost their homes, and who have lost their towns.
You can read articles and see many pictures of the flood at the Cedar Rapids Gazette website: http://gazetteonline.com
You can also check out photos people have uploaded to Flickr.
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bentos · food · photo · preschool
