Phwew! After a week off school, I was completely out of the habit of making lunches and snacks for school! I totally forgot to put something together until 5 minutes before we had to head out the door so I threw together this quick snack of ham cubes and one of Wyatt’s beloved buns. I added a lion pick to snazz it up a bit and to give him something to use to eat the ham besides his fingers. The lion pick was chosen to match the lion on the lid of the bento box:
I’m all about the coordination, folks!
Tuesday:
Tuesday was Laptop Lunchbox day. I put in a couple of Chessman cookies, pretzel sticks, dried cranberries, peaches and pears with sprinkles, a whole wheat bun, ham cubes and apple slices. As usual, he didn’t eat the apple slices but I like to put them in now and then just in case he decides to try them.
Wednesday:
Lunch on Wednesday was sweet Italian chicken sausage rounds, a lone cherry tomato, banana bread and pineapple and blueberries arranged to look like a bumble bee (though I didn’t really realize that until I was reviewing the pictures).
The Italian sausage is a new food we’re trying. As you’ve probably gathered by now, Wyatt is a sausage lover, but he’s always declared Italian sausage to be “too spicy”. I bought these sausages for a lasagna I made on Tuesday night and he was eating the chunks almost as fast as I could put them into the pan so I decided to try them out for his lunch on Wednesday.
I packed an applesauce crusher, pretzel thins and dried cranberries for his snacks.
Thursday:
Thursday’s lunch had wedges of whole wheat flat bread that I toasted and spread with a smidge of butter and garlic salt, blueberries, pretzel thins, banana bread, pineapple chunks, grape tomatoes and a block of baked tofu with his name in it.
Friday:
Today’s snack was some blueberries and a hand full of pretzel thins.
February 12, 2010: I made a batch of hard-boiled eggs for breakfasts and lunches and put them in a carton in the fridge. Zach and I got our wires crossed when I told him where they were and this is what ended up happening when he gave one a good whack on the counter to peel it.
February 13, 2010: Oh. My. God. This is one of those humiliating motherhood moments like no other. I was checking Wyatt’s homework over before I sent it off to school and I noticed this drawing at the bottom of the page where he was practicing writing his P’s. It’s a picture of a guy shooting a gun at someone and saying, “HA HA HA HA”. I didn’t even know Wyatt knew how to spell “ha ha”. He says it was a good guy shooting a “bad guy”, but I was still appalled.
February 14, 2010: Tubby time!
February 15, 2010: Wyatt was off school for winter break this week so I tried to get us out of the house every day to do something fun. This day we went up to Tilden park to ride the steam trains. It was the first time we’d gone with Augie since he’s been aware of his surroundings and I was curious to see how he liked it. When we took Wyatt at about the same age, he was so scared that we dubbed them the “terror trains”, but it ended up that Augie thought the ride was pretty fun. (Wyatt loved the trains the next time we rode them, by the way…)
February 16, 2010: Zach let Wyatt play with his phone as a reward for being well-behaved at dinner. He likes to play Doodle Jump and he’s pretty good at it. Note the little red socks on the floor under Augie’s high chair. He takes his socks off practically every time he eats a meal.
February 17, 2010: Yay! Yay! YAY!!! My new camera came! This is one of the photos I took the first day. I used the highly sophisticated stick-out-your-arm-and-click method of photography.
February 18, 2010: For another fun vacation activity I took the kids to the Bay Area Discovery Museum. Here August works on building the Golden Gate Bridge.
Wyatt’s was off school last week, so I haven’t been making him lunches. (Well, actually, I have been making him lunches — I just haven’t been packing them into bento boxes.) To keep the bento love flowing, I thought I would share some of my favorite places to visit for bento inspiration.
Lunch in a Box — This is the blog that started me on my bento hobby. Biggie doesn’t make super-arty bentos, but she does make attractive bentos quickly which made me think, “Hey, I could do that!”
Mr. Bento Flickr Group — My first bento box was the Mr. Bento set that my husband bought me for Christmas. I used to fill it dutifully every day to take to work with me and I would photograph my lunches and post them to this group. Since I got laid off, poor Mr. Bento has been collecting dust, but if I’m ever gainfully employed at a job that requires me to work on site again, I’ll be pulling him out and putting him to work again.
Sakurako Kitsa’s Flickr Stream — Sakurako Kitsa makes my absolute favorite art bentos. They’re whimsical and adorable and I pour over her photos trying to figure out what she used to make the various elements of each lunch.
Happy Little Bento — Sherimiya always has something fun and delicious-looking to share.
The time has come to say good-bye to my beloved camera. My Canon Digital Rebel 300D has officially bit the dust. It started flashing an error message two weeks ago, and after a consultation with a repair shop I was informed that the shutter was broken and it would cost nearly $200 to repair. Ouch! Since this would be the second repair in less than a year, I had some hard thinking to do. I chatted up some of my photographer-type friends and the consensus seemed to be that the life span of a camera like mine wasn’t much longer than the five years I’ve had it. Sure, I could fix the camera this time, but there are likely other parts that are on the verge of wearing out. I started seeing lots of expensive repairs in my future.
Still, I hate the idea that a camera like this is simply at the end of it’s life. I’m really, really annoyed that something this expensive isn’t built to last or even really built to be repaired. It drives me nuts that so many products are cheaper to replace than to maintain!
I stewed over this decision for over a week and then finally, my husband decided that he was going to get me a new camera. My new camera arrived today and I’m so excited about it. It’s faster, smaller, it has a bigger screen and lots more bells and whistles. I know it’s going to be a really great friend to me.
But I’m still feeling a little sentimental about my old camera. It had a really good run. I’m not sure of the exact date we got it, but I know that it was in early April of 2005, so we’ve had it approximately 4 years, 10 months or 1767 days. In that time I took…
Wait for it…
Seriously, it’s worth it.
47577 photos!
That’s an average of 27 photos per day for the last five years! Wow!
This old camera has captured births and birthdays, Christmases, Halloweens, babies, big kids, cuddles, naps, friends, family, beach trips, snow trips, trips to the playground, countless photos of a kid in a Batman suit, countless pictures of toddlers eating in their high chairs, bentos — dear God, there have been a lot of bento pictures! There have been photos of dishes, laundry, craft projects, and other things that are so mundane I can’t even remember them. Lamps! I’ve taken photos of lamps! Seriously — who takes pictures of lamps?
A woman who loves her camera, that’s who.
Good-bye, old friend. Thanks for all the memories!
As if it weren’t crazy enough that I’ve taken on two huge challenges for myself this year (photo a day and my 73 goals), I decided to go completely nutso and I signed up for Lain Ehmann’s Layout a Day Scrapbooking Challenge for the month of February. Actually, one of the main reasons I signed up for this project is to help me accomplish Goal #21: Make at least 30 scrapbook layouts. So far I’ve managed my one layout per day which would make me happy even if that’s all I did for the month. I think I made around 4 or 5 layouts in all of 2009 so I’ve already tripled my output in comparison to last year. Here are some of the pages I’ve made so far:
February 5, 2010: As I mentioned last week, my camera started flashing an error message and stopped taking pictures. I loaded Augie up into the car and headed to the camera repair shop in Oakland where we took it when the auto-focus stopped working. After a 45 minute drive through Friday afternoon traffic, this was the what I was met with when I got to the shop. The big sign says that the store will be closed from October 22 to November 13. Reading this at the beginning of February was my first hint that something was amiss. The other sign was posted by the insurance agency next door and said that they hadn’t heard from the owner since he closed in October. I hope nothing bad happened to the guy, but I was also totally bummed to make that long trip for no reason. Then, to make matters worse, Augie pitched a fit when I went to put him back in his car seat. As I was wrestling him into his seat, I started catching whiffs of some horrible smell. After I got him in the car, I checked my shoes to see if I stepped in dog poop but they were clean. I started looking around on the ground and pretty soon I deduced that when I’d parked the car, I’d run over a Burger King bag filled with poop. Yuck!
February 6, 2010: Over the past few months, Wyatt has been collecting medium sized stones from our yard and various parks we visit and then placing them on top of our mailbox. I find this to be totally annoying because every time I get the mail I’m afraid that rocks are going to fall on me and I’m even more scared that they’ll fall on our mail carrier. I was taking them off every few days, but he always puts them back on so eventually I just kind of gave up. But then the other day he added three huge dirt clods and an old dog bone. This is where I draw the line.
February 7, 2010: Look at our sweet-faced little buddy! Love him!
February 8, 2010: Look at this tough-faced little buddy! I love him too!
February 9, 2010: Wyatt had a tough play date after school. It was one of those days where both boys wanted to play, but neither was really up to it. There was lots of arguing about who was the boss of who and neither was able to be distracted, so the other mom and I decided to cut our losses and keep the boys at our respective homes. Wyatt was feeling pretty fragile when we settled back in and he decided that he needed some hot chocolate, graham crackers and jigsaw puzzles with his mom to feel better, so that’s just what we did.
February 10, 2010: I went to the grocery store to stock up and I was there for over 20 minutes before I noticed that I was wearing my slippers! In my defense, they have rubber soles, so they feel very much like shoes, but still — that’s just ridiculous!
February 11, 2010: When the boys and I got up in the morning, they started fighting over toys almost immediately. Despite my best efforts to distract and redirect them, neither of them could go more than about a minute and a half without aggravating the other. I’m not very tolerant of screeching before I’ve even had the chance to put the kettle on for tea, so I reached my limit very quickly and decided to separate them. I put up the baby gate and settled Augie into the living room with some toys and set Wyatt to the task of getting dressed in the kitchen. Before the water had even come to a boil, the two of them had both moved over to the gate and were giggling and playing nicely with each other. Brothers! They can’t live with or without each other!
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bentos · food · kindergarten · photo
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