With regard to school lunches, I must say that I’m much less creative than April with regard to content (case in point: her kids' lunches). I certainly try to make them as healthy as possible but to appease my picky kids the lunches tend to have a lot of the same food in them from week to week. I'm the first one to admit they don’t score that high on variety.
So one way I try to step up—ummm— the excitement factor (I guess?) is by leaving a little note with their lunches every day. For my 7-year-old, we decided to focus on trivia this year. I’ll make up a question and she writes in her answer with the pen we leave in her lunch box. Sometimes she’ll pick a category, or sometimes I will, but she loves it and it gives me something to write other than “Have a nice day! We love you!”
Below are some recent trivia lunch notes, covering family, history, art, and sports and math in one (a combo!).
The notes tend to reference something I know she’s seen, heard, or learned. I’m not going to ask her something she has no chance of knowing, but I do like for her to search the recesses of her brain for the answer.
For my 5-year-old, she is happy with a standard “love note” as she calls it. I try to reference something we have going on that afternoon or tell her a joke. I learned she's not only picky about food; yesterday she declared her lunch note the “Most. Boring. Note. Ever.” Wow. Ouch. I guess it won’t always be a hit but I’m still determined to not miss a day!
Oh, and those adorable notepad sheets? You can get those here.