The sandwich-less lunch

Some moms pack their kids’ lunches the night before the school day but I pack my kids’ lunches in the morning while they’re getting ready or eating breakfast. With Jesse, he usually wants the same thing for lunch: A peanut butter sandwich, chips or crackers, juice box and a cookie. But Jennifer likes a little more variety; she never eats the same lunch every single day. When Jennifer tells me what she wants in her lunch for the day, there is usually a sandwich included. That changed this week.

On Monday, she had a sandwich in her lunch, but later, she didn’t request a sandwich that time. She’d noted in the past that she didn’t want to keep taking a sandwich in her lunch so this week, she went sandwich-less. I have heard of other parents ditching sandwiches for their kids’ lunches. Some have had wraps or even the items needed to make “sandwich crackers.” I have come across many articles specifically talking about sandwich-free lunches. Until now, the only change my kids have had with sandwich lunches are cracker sandwiches (usually through a Lunchable). But now Jennifer was ready to go sandwich-less for lunch!

The first sandwich-free lunch looked more like a bunch of snacks rather than a lunch. I have asked Jennifer if she’d try a wrap instead of a sandwich but she wasn’t interested. Her “snack lunch” contained Goldfish crackers, Cheetos, a granola bar, Oreos and a juice box.

The second sandwich-free lunch is what I like to call the “breakfast lunch.” I have told my kids there’s nothing wrong with eating cereal for dinner. Why not for lunch, as well?

Her breakfast lunch included Life cereal and Honey Nut Chex. There were also potato chips, peanuts, and Nilla wafers. Along with a juice box!

Today, however, Jennifer decided to go back to having a sandwich in her lunch. It was a fun experience to try something different from the same old sandwich for lunch, though! I would definitely be willing to try this again and also give other sandwich-free lunch ideas a try should either of my kids want something different for lunch that day.

For five schools in Eugene, there IS such a thing as a free lunch!

Usually, before a new week of school starts, I will take some time to go over the week’s lunch menu in order to anticipate which days Jesse will be buying lunch or if he will be taking a lunch. That’s what I was doing yesterday afternoon. Jennifer has informed me that she wants to take a lunch to school every day, though I did ask her if she’d be willing to try the school lunch food every once in a while and she said she would. Jesse, however, has not yet decided if he wants to take a lunch every day, so we are pretty much leaving that open. If he likes what is being served for lunch, then he’ll buy it. But if not, then not.

So, I logged onto the school lunch menu site yesterday and brought up the menu. I called Jesse over to stand next to me and look at tomorrow’s lunch with me. Seeing something he would like to try, he told me he would buy lunch for today. I told him that that was fine and he did have money in his school lunch account, so that wasn’t a problem.

“Look, Mom, lunch is free,” he said, pointing at an area of the menu. I looked to where he was pointing and was surprised to discover that, this year, lunch for all students was indeed free. F-R-E-E!!! The school usually served breakfast to students for free, but now breakfast and lunch were both free! Hooray!

We both cheered and hugged over this good news.

It is sooo nice to have the weight of worry off of my shoulders over being able to make sure there was money available for my son’s school lunches. Last year, it was pretty rough, and there were times his lunch account got very negative. Now we won’t have to worry about that this year! I am so glad!

It’s interesting that this happened because just the other day I was grumbling over how people in jail get 3 meals a day for free but children in schools have to pay for just one lunch!

Also, over the summer, I was reading about schools that were now offering students free lunches. I got into a conversation with someone on Facebook about this and I was saying how I wished more schools would do this. There are so many families out there struggling to put food on the table as it is and they can barely have any food or money for their kids’ school lunches. For many children in many families, a school lunch is the only decent meal a child would receive in one day! I am glad that some schools offer free breakfast and/or free lunch to the students. I just wish every school in America could do that!

Even so, I was wondering why there was a change now. What brought about this change in policy? Was it a long-term thing? Did other schools in the area do this, too? Would we have to compensate in other areas of the school in order to make up for money lost on school lunches?

I got my answers today, when my son brought home a flyer explaining the situation. Basically, there is something called the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), which is part of the Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act of 2010. This program selects a certain handful of schools in different areas to determine if they are eligible to serve free lunches to students. Eligible schools must have enough students that meet the program’s criteria. The 5 schools in Eugene that are serving free lunch to students this year are: Cesar Chavez Elementary, Howard Elementary, McCornack Elementary, River Road/El Camino del Rio Elementary, and Arts & Technology Academy. My son’s school is one of those 5 schools in Eugene that are eligible for the CEP. One of the other schools is the school my daughter attended last year! Oh, if only both of their schools were eligible for free lunches!

Still, Jen is happy to take a lunch to her high school, and that saves us money, too. I am still happy that at least one school is serving free lunches and we won’t have to worry about making sure my child has enough money to buy a hot meal.

I am very grateful and immensely relieved that my son’s school can now offer free breakfast AND lunch to students. It’s so important for a child to be well-fed, and hunger is a very big problem in today’s society. A child shouldn’t go hungry. I am grateful the CEP exists and so glad that for this year at least, students at 5 schools in Eugene can really have a free lunch.

Bento box lunches?

This morning, while I was drinking my first cup of coffee, I was going through my email accounts and I came across an article written by a mom who started giving her kids Bento box lunches. I have heard of the Bento box lunches but never really got into them. But after reading this article, I decided to look into that further. In fact, I’d been thinking of creating a board on Pinterest about school lunches so I decided to “just do it” today and created the board, but in this case pinning stuff about Bento box lunches. And I gotta say, wow! This is a really big thing! There were tons of images and articles on Bento box lunch ideas. It really grabbed my interest in using them all the more!

So when Jesse finished getting dressed for school, I asked him if he was interested in me packing him some Bento box lunches for school. I showed him a picture of a Bento box lunch in another article and he scowled. “That’s for babies,” he said. I assured him that kids of all ages were using Bento boxes for their school lunches and there were even adults packing their work lunch into Bento boxes. I also showed him the many different types of Bento box lunches I had pinned on my board.

Still, he wasn’t very interested in them. He thought the cool shapes were neat but he just wasn’t interested.

I guess some school years will be different with his lunches. One year, he only wanted Lunchables for his lunch. At one point during that time, however, one of the lunch volunteers took me aside when I was visiting one day and told me that Jesse was not eating the meat in his Lunchables. She also told me she had been sitting with him to encourage him to eat the lunch meat in his meals. Even though I was irritated that she was forcing my son to eat something he doesn’t like, I thanked her for the info. (My son is not a big meat-eater. He likes hot dogs and chicken nuggets, and every once in a while he eats bacon or a corn dog, but he’s just not into eating that much meat.)

This year, however, any time he wants to take a lunch to school, Jesse always requests the same thing:

Juice box
Peanut butter sandwich, without crust and cut into 4 triangles
Crackers (either Ritz, Cheez-It, Goldfish or Wheat Thins)
Raisins
Treat (either a cookie, fruit snack, Twinkie, cupcake or some other sweet item)

And so far, he hasn’t asked for anything different! I did consider asking him if he’d like those foods in a Bento box, but not sure if that will catch on for him.

Later, I told my daughter about the Bento box lunches too. I told her it was like a Lunchables but with more variety and you don’t always get the same thing. She was curious about it and said that she might want to start taking a Bento box lunch to school. I made a mental note to look for them at the store. I know that some parents are even creating their own Bento-style-boxes with used containers and muffin cups. It’s something else to think about too. I’m just glad I have some lunch ideas now!

I think the Bento box lunches are cool. At first, I thought maybe it would be bad in case it’s lost at the school or maybe they’ll end up in the trash can instead of being brought back home, but it might work out okay. I am totally for trying new foods and trying new things and if this is something that the kids want to use, or even one of my kids, then I think it might be a nice change from what they normally eat for lunch.

Lunchtime, and the picky eater

It seems like it’s one of the great laws of the universe: Every child is a picky eater. Both of my kids have been in a position to receive the World’s Pickiest Eater Award, if there was one to receive! Jennifer outgrew being a picky eater. I try to make the foods she likes, but she has grudgingly eaten even some of the foods she doesn’t like. With Jesse, on the other hand, it’s like I’m going through the Food Wars all over again – and this time, it’s interfering with his ability to eat lunch at school.

Recently, I asked Jesse what he ate for lunch at school. He told me he didn’t eat anything. I asked him why and he said he didn’t know. Then I asked him some other questions in order to understand what happened, such as if he was offered any food or if he wasn’t hungry, etc. He pretty much said he didn’t get to eat while everybody else did. And he told me he wasn’t offered anything to eat! I was upset about this, of course, as was my husband when I told him. Jesse normally takes a lunch to school, but today he was not able to. So I brought up this issue to find out what was going on.

I got a response this evening – a little too late for him to get a sack lunch from the cafeteria today. But when I read the teacher’s reply, it was definitely NOT the way Jesse had told it.

According to his teacher, Jesse IS being offered food at lunchtime, but the problem is, he’s not eating it. This was why I decided to send him a lunch from home in the first place; they gave him sack lunches and he never ate any of it! The food usually went to waste, and I hate wasting food. So I started to pack him a lunch, but when I couldn’t today, I just hoped he wouldn’t go hungry today.

Well, he did, but it wasn’t the school’s fault. According to the teacher’s email, there was a tray of sandwiches, fruits and veggies available for kids who didn’t have a lunch, but Jesse only picked an apple that he did not eat.

So, the bottom line is, he IS getting food at school, but he’s just not eating it. Ugh! No wonder he always comes home from school so hungry. (I usually fix him something to eat when he gets home from school. I know what kinds of things he likes -- hot dogs, cheese quesadillas, corn dogs, chicken nuggets and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches -- all things he can't get at school. Especially the peanut butter since a child in his class has a severe peanut allergy and his classroom is a "peanut-free zone.")

The reason why I could not send a lunch with Jesse today is because we were out of juice boxes. I did not have a cold drink to stick into his lunch. But I just remembered we have bottled water in storage for emergencies, so maybe the next time this happens, I’ll just give him bottled water to take along with his food. It seems like he’s just not going to eat school lunches at this time. Maybe later, he will eat the school lunches, but it’s just not going to happen now.