Back to School Time!

 

It’s that time of year again!  Our boys started school last week and so our school routines have been dragged out from the back of the closet along with the backpacks and lunch boxes.  Today I am sharing a few quick tips that help us survive the back to school madness and still eat healthy at the same time!

 

At the charter school where our boys attend school, there is no school cafeteria and so there are no options for buying lunch at school.  This is actually totally fine with us since we like to feed our kids healthy food and that is so much easier to do when the only option is what’s packed in your lunchbox that day!  We recognize that, eventually, our kids are going to grow up and make their own choices about what foods go into their body but, for now, we are going to enjoy the opportunity to choose what they eat during the school day!  

 

Every night before a school day, after cleaning up the dinner dishes, we work together in the kitchen to pack 3 snack boxes and 3 lunch boxes for the next day of school.  We love our metal snack boxes, which come with 4 small compartments.  We typically pack these sections with fruits, veggies, nuts, cheese, meat, or muffins.  We try our best to use seasonal and local ingredients wherever possible.  We also enlist the help of the kids to shop for and prepare these items so that they will be more likely to eat it when they find it in their snack box or lunch box!

 

 

 

We also use metal lunch boxes and these have either 2 or 3 compartments each.  We usually pack dinner leftovers in one section of their lunch bin and fill the other side with more fruits and veggies.  If there are no leftovers from dinner, or if the dinner doesn’t lend itself well to a packed lunch, we might go with another option like meat and cheese rollups with crackers and hummus.  We also include a joke of the day written on a sticky note and attached to the top of their lunch bin.  This gives them something to look forward every day and hopefully makes them laugh 🙂

 

Packing the snacks and lunches the night before can make the school mornings so much less stressful for all of us.  We also love to use overnight breakfast options during the school year to make our mornings run more smoothly. 

 

And one last tip for calming the back-to-school craziness is to use the slow cooker as much as possible for making dinner!  I used slow cooker meals for 3 out of the first 4 days of school so that I could dedicate the after-school hours at home to my kids and I could be totally focused on them instead of in the kitchen preparing dinner. 

 

Here is a favorite slow cooker recipe in our house.  I hope that you love this recipe as much as we do and that you are all surviving back-to-school time in your house!

 

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