An Update on My New Lunch Experiment

When I posted my menu plan this week I was going to try something new.  I decided to experiment by making all of my kid's lunches for the week on Sunday night.  My inspiration was from Life as a Mom.  I posted a picture of it to Facebook and several of my friends wanted to hear how the sandwiches were towards the end of the week, you know after they had been in the fridge for a while.

First let me tell you what I did.  I bought 12 containers.  They were 6 for $4.59 at Meijer.  I decided on two lunches.  One lunch consisted of half of a peanut butter sandwich (some of my kids like jelly and some don't so I made it easy on myself), grapes and carrot sticks.  The other lunch was a homemade lunchable with Aldi "Ritz" crackers, lunch meat, grapes and carrots.  The crackers were in the separate compartment so they would not get wet and soggy.

The verdict:
I made them on Sunday night.  As of Thursday the sandwiches were still good.  By Friday they were slightly dry but my kids did not notice and ate them anyway.  The grapes and carrots of course stayed fresh.  The crackers will still crispy and the lunchmeat was still good.

Now, first off I have small children so they don't eat a lot.  If you have bigger kids you would want a whole sandwich and maybe you might fill a plastic bag with extras like chips or something, but you could still do that on Sunday night and keep those in the cabinet.  And have your kids help you.  My daughter did the grapes for me.

I will tell you this is by far my best experiment.  Lunches were way too easy.  I only fixed drinks and had the children grab their lunches from the fridge.  Now, I do have an extra fridge in my garage so it was convenient for me.  If you only have one fridge and lots of kids this might not work as well for you but it is honestly worth clearing out a little space in your fridge for it!

I just always dreaded lunches.   Now I don't!  Another benefit that my husband pointed out is that if they don't eat all of their food we just put the lid back on and when they are hungry again we just tell them to eat the rest of their lunch.  Another bonus - when it came time to pack a lunch for my son's school day (he only goes 2 days a week), I just threw it in his lunchbox.  Yet another bonus, when we had to go somewhere I just grabbed the containers and we either ate on the go or at whatever place we were planning to be - saving money by not eating out!  I had no excuses because the lunches were already done.

Now I do think if you made your kids lunchmeat sandwiches they would get soggy pretty quickly but they  might hold out (anyone try that?).  I may try to think up other things I could put in these containers but for now, this works pretty well and I haven't had any complaints yet.

If you have any ideas as to what other easy lunches would work for me I would love to hear them!