It’s summer and now I have to feed our school-aged kids all day, every day. This is not the first time I’ve had to deal with this challenge. Two years ago I made a list of 31 Plant-Based Sandwich Ideas and I’ll be tapping into that again all summer long.

Except this year it’ll be on GF bread for me (seriously this health journey is a trip!)

To help reduce my stress around summer meals, I’m putting in the effort to meal prep lunches with my 6 and 8 year old. We cut up veggies, fruit, and dip cups on Sunday and leave them in the fridge. Then we put crackers/chips/pretzels/popcorn, or whatever shelf stable crunchy food I bought that week, into the bento boxes. Then all that has to be done before going out the door is put things together and sticking the whole thing into their lunchboxes or the cooler backpack that I use in the summer.

Everything here is plastic free or only has a plastic lid (the glass storage containers for the fridge and my salad bowl).

Stainless Steel Bento Boxes

You can find lots of different ones out there but my favorites are the WeeSprout brand. I’ve been using theirs for years. Each comes with a little dressing/hummus/ketchup container and as long as the kids close them up tightly after use they’re spill resistant!

The silicone bumper is not really necessary but it helps soften the noise and it gives my kids another chance to fight over which color they get. I do everything I can to foster those opportunities (if the sarcasm didn’t hit you in the face there let me assure you, I do everything I can to avoid conflict.)

Uncrustable Maker

I got ahead of myself and got the Costco box of Grape Uncrustables. Found out that very same day that neither of my kids like the grape ones. So, if I’ve tried to pawn them off on your kids lately, yes I’m being generous, but also I don’t want to find these frozen in the burn at the bottom of our chest freezer in four years.

My biggest complaint about Uncrustables is that I can’t seem to find the whole wheat bread ones in packs bigger than 4. And since my 8 year old will crush 3 sandwiches at a time (as long as it’s any flavor but grape) that doesn’t really work for me.

Enter the Uncrustable Maker. I’m hoping this way my kids will get the perfect PB to J ratio and be excited about eating them because they got to help make them!

Silicone Lunch Dividers

The internet came through on this one. For years I have used silicone cupcake liners for dividers in their WeeSprout bento boxes. However these cupcake liners were flimsy and a lot shorter than the wall of the box meaning things like blueberries or chocolate covered almonds would spill out the sides.

I dug deep on Amazon last weekend and found these lunchbox dividers. They’re squared off which means they fit in the bento box much more easily and they’re freezable which means I can slice up the strawberries that are about to go bad, freeze them, then put frozen ones into these little containers and pop them back into the freezer until lunch day!

This helps keep the fruit cold too which anyone who has bitten into a hot piece of watermelon will tell you is gross.

Fruit Forks

Speaking of fruit, I have found that my kids will 3X their consumption of healthy foods if it’s presented in a novel way. Enter “fruit forks“. You can go with standard appetizer forks but I leaned into the kid factor and got this under-the-sea set.

And yes, they asked if I could switch the colors of the different animals because one loved sea horses but wanted it to be pink not green.

😳

Sexy Salad

Novelty works on adults too. I was on a mason jar salad kick a decade ago and then kids happened and I never was able to do it again. Well last weekend I made myself a buffalo chickpea mason jar salad with celery, carrots, red peppers, radishes, cucumbers, and lettuce, and buffalo dressing which also got tossed on the chickpeas as they cooked for a minute on the stove. It was spicy but so delicious!

I also prepped a kale, radish, and cabbage salad with a tahini dressing which was way tastier than it sounds. When we took our lunches to a playground on the first day of summer with some friends, I split the salad between the prep container and this bowl and my girlfriend and I enjoyed salads while our kids ran around.

I wish it was double walled but the salad was still cold for us because I had used our..

Cooler Backpack

I cannot count the number of times we’ve used this puppy. Bike rides, picnics, pool days, boat days, beach days, tailgates. We stick thin ice packs through it but as the pictures will show you this insulated cooler backpack is leakproof so you could just toss ice right in!