Happy Halloween!!! Since we are far from being traditional, John's Halloween lunch is a bit ... well ... us.
It's a light lunch since he's going to be having LOTS of snacks at school for their party and then probably a pretty big dinner when we go trick or treating tonight at the mall. Ham & cheese TARDIS, colby jack words, provolone trick-or-treater, grapes and Halloween LifeSaver Gummies.
John decided months ago that he wanted to be the Doctor for Halloween but kept flip-flopping between wanting to be "Doctor Ten" or "Doctor Eleven."
He's going to be both.
In the picture above is his "Doctor Ten" (with Adipose) for trick-or-treating tonight and for his party and parade at school today he'll be "Doctor Eleven" :
Poor Gerald is so so sad and poor Piggie keeps trying to cheer him up in another great book by Mo Willems: My Friend is Sad. One of the ways that Piggie tries to cheer up his elephant friend is by dressing up as a robot and that's what inspired John's lunch for today. He has mini ham and cheese sandwiches for Gerald and Piggie, SnaPea Crisps, yogurt raisins, fruit snacks, and Scrabble Jr CheezIts.
We love love love Sandra Boynton and especially her Little Pookie books. What's Wrong, Little Pookie? has been a particular favorite of mine since John was a baby and I would read it to him while rocking him. It still holds a place of honor on his nightstand. We read it together for the first time a few nights ago and when we got to the very large hippo with the itty bitty shoes John almost fell off of the bed he was laughing so hard!
The usual suspects for lunch: pb&j on wheat, colby jack cheese, grapes, and fruit snacks.
Don't forget to enter to win a free three month subscription to MOMables!!! Just because John likes to eat the same things over and over again doesn't mean you should have to ;)
John has loved Thomas The Tank Engine for as long as I can remember. How it's possible that this is his first Thomas lunch I have no idea but I apparently did a good job putting his lunch together since he actually cheered when he saw it!
Thomas is pb&j on wheat with colby jack letters, pretzel sticks, yogurt raisins and fruit snacks.
When John first flipped through the pages of Jed Henry's I Speak Dinosaur! he was fairly certain that he would end up having to put a sad face on his reading log because it would be too hard.
He only needed help on the nonsense words and a couple of others!!!
His sandwich is MOMables' Kids Classic Egg Salad (I normally make his egg salad with ranch or thousand island so we'll see how the change up goes over!). He also has some mini Ritz, a colby jack stick, grapes and fruit snacks.
John reread J. Elizabeth Mills' The Spooky Wheels on the Bus on his Storia app last night for part of his nightly reading homework. I'm absolutely blown away with how much better he's getting at reading. He still needed help with a couple of words but not nearly as many as he did when we first got the book a few weeks back. My boy is back to being excited about every new book that comes into his possession and that thrills me beyond belief! (He's NOT a big fan of having to return library books, though. Once he gets one he loves he wants to keep it!)
For lunch he's got a ham & cheese spooky bus, pretzel sticks, grapes and fruit snacks. He's also getting a yogurt tube and juice.
Wiggle was one of the first books John picked out to read from this week's trip to the library. John is definitely a wiggle-butt so this was a great book for him to wiggle and giggle over! (Pretty soon I'll have to start venturing to other branches of our library as I've
about exhausted the "just right" selections from the one I've been going
to!)
PB&J, cheese, yogurt raisins, Totally Ranch Munchies and chocolate pretzels are in the box. He'll also have an apple and his typical juice in his bag.
Luther's Halloween is a fun little book I grabbed at the library for John about a boy and his triceratops, Luther. Luther dresses up as a pirate for Halloween which makes it even more perfect for John. Dinosaurs AND pirates??? Can't get much better than that!
Luther is pb&j on wheat holding a sword pick. There are also grapes, all-natural fruit snacks, a Mini Slim Jim, and a colby jack "Roar." (John is very much a creature of habit. He could probably have this same exact combination of food every day and not get tired of it!)
Halloween is so close I can almost hear the ghosts howling in delight, can't you? We're celebrating a little early with a great Halloween Blog Hop so after you're done checking out what John and I are having, make you head over to Oh!Bento to see what treats (or tricks) are in-store next!
Jack is pb&j on wheat. "Jack" is colby jack on top of SnapPea Crisps. There are also Halloween LifeSaver Gummies, yogurt raisins, and pieces of Mini Slim Jims in the main box. When John saw the small skull & crossbones Tupperware bowl he wanted something in that, too, and picked out the fruit salad.
For Mom:
A tribute to the Psych episode "This Episode Sucks"
Some pineapple & ham pizza, dried pineapple and cranberries, vanilla yogurt, and V8 cocktail labelled "Type O Negative."
And the preview clip from the episode:
Now, don't forget to go check out the next stop on the hop!
(All hop posts should give live around 9am EST ... or so ...)
We got to revisit some old friends last night: Genie, Aladdin, Jasmine and Abu! John was thrilled when he saw that one of the books in the library pile was As You Wish -- and even more thrilled when he could read most of it without any help!
Genie is a roast beef sandwich coming out of a colby jack lamp with more colby jack for the lettering (it's our favorite!). He also has yogurt raisins, a granola bar and some LifeSaver Gummies. An unpictured apple is also in his bag.
The first book John picked out to read from the latest trip to the library was Mo Willems' We Are In A Book! We've been saying "banana" and cracking up ever since.
Gerald and Piggie are bologna and cheese on wheat. "Banana" is cut from colby jack cheese. He also has some Honey-Nana Chobani Champions yogurt, banana chips, and a chocolate chip granola bar with a banana pic stuck in it.
Ahhh The Doctor and Rose. While not my favorite companion of all-time (that has to go to Sarah Jane), or even of the New-Who (that's Donna Noble), she and The Doctor certainly had something remarkable together. Back when I first joined Pinterest I stumbled upon an image from The Idiot's Lantern that is just so them ... and had to become lunch.
I couldn't think of anything much more vintagely "domestic" for dinner than meatloaf, mac&cheese and broccoli. It was 1953, after all.
In case you didn't know:
The quote "the domestic approach" comes about from the episode. It was first uttered by Ten at the very beginning of the episode (in the scene immediately following the opening credits ... which is oddly absent from YouTube), and again by Rose at the very end:
Until then I've got a lot of bits and pieces from episodes that I haven't covered yet.
You know, almost fifty years worth.
From the first time we saw The Statue of Liberty in "The Angels Take Manhattan" ...
Flax seed bread covered with pasta sauce and provolone, a colby jack stick, pepperoni slices and a not-quite-so-big apple. Yeah, I'm totally thinking pizza .... and an apple.
One of the things I love about the library is the ability to borrow eBooks like the one John read and fell in love with a couple of days ago: Frank Was a Monster Who Wanted to Dance by Keith Graves. It took a couple of days for Frank to make it into lunch because we couldn't decide which page to use ... until we re-read it Thursday night.
Poor Frank had already danced his brain out .... and lost an eye .... and an arm .... but he loved to dance so much that in spite of it all he just kept on going "and laughed as his head fell off of his neck."
Frank is bologna and cheese on wheat and is cut into three mini sandwiches since he isn't all in one piece anymore anyway. The "hahaha" is colby jack cheese. In the right hand section he has grapes, Halloween LifeSaver Gummies, and frozen yogurt brains. I know that by the time he gets to lunch it will just be yogurt, but he'll know that they started out as brains!
When John came home from school today he had two new Storia eBooks waiting for him on my iPad. The pick of the night (and, therefore, tomorrow's lunch): Max Spaniel: Dinosaur Hunt!
(Can you tell I was having fun playing with my new Nikon COOLPIX S4300 with Eye-Fi card?)
Max is pb&j on wheat holding a football head pick. The flower bed is SnaPea Crisps with fruit snack flowers. There are also grapes, veggie cream cheese for dipping, and alphabet cookies spelling out Max.
For Wednesday John asked for a PB&J Cat, Alphabet cookies (there are 3 random letters under the c, a, t), Mini Slim Jims, clementine segments, colby jack "cupcakes" and an unpictured yogurt tub or tube.
No school today because of Columbus Day or some such ridiculousness so John got to have a little more input than he usual for his Tuesday lunch. His first decision: the book had to be The Mixed-Up Alphabet which he read last night on his Scholastic Storia app!
Packing in the Lock & Lock box made things super-easy. Each of the four sections has 3 layers: a side, a quarter of a bologna sandwich, and then a colby jack letter (accessorized as closely as I could to how they are in the book). Clockwise from top left the bottom layers are: grapes, alphabet cookies, Totally Ranch Munchies, and yogurt raisins.
John is thrilled with it! He loved the book and it's great for a beginning reader. There were quite a few words that he didn't know but when some of them were repeated later in the story he nailed them without hesitation. One of John's big issues has been retention. He can be told what a word is on one page and two pages later have to be told again. He pays such great attention with fun books like this and the others that we've read on Storia so far that even the hard words don't discourage him as much as they used to. He'll either ask, click, or work on sounding them out because he cares that much about getting to the next part of the tale! (Can you tell I'm thrilled???)
Before the seventh season of Doctor Who began there was an online series of mini webisodes about Amy and Rory and their life at home that was aptly named "Pond Life." It was suggested that I use one of those as inspiration for tonight's lunch!
The complete set of clips (plus a pretty spot-on countdown of things learned from them) can be found at Den of Geek, but here's the specific webisode being used:
All packed up in my great new set given to be my one of the most awesome friends a girl could ever ask for:
(screen cap/calorie count from MyFitnessPal -- add me if you're on it, too!)
Now that we're on the mid-season break for Doctor Who I've decided to add Being Human back to my instant queue on Netflix .... even though I've already seen each episode at least twice.
Tonight's lunch is a tribute to Mitchell, George, and Annie from the episode "Flotsam and Jetsam."
The top left has mashed potatoes with Mitchell's quote in colby jack cheese.
The bottom left has rolled deli chicken breast topped with two small cheese sandwiches in the shape of a pigeon & George's shoe.
The top right has applesauce with Annie's tea cups.
The bottom right has Chobani Champions yogurt with Annie's book .... and yet one more tea cup.
John has his first First Grade field trip tomorrow to a pumpkin farm! He instantly knew what he wanted -- the last page from There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Leaves which we have on the iPad thanks to the oh-so-awesome Storia app from Scholastic. He's read it twice now and I'm sure it'll be re-read many more times until he can do it without any help from me or the app itself (he can click on the word he's having trouble with and it'll read it for him).
It's a "snacky" lunch since I'm sure the kids will all be distracted by the excitement of eating at the farm. He has cheese cracker "sandwiches," the pumpkin scarecrow is cheddar on a toothpick pole, a couple of Brach's pumpkins and the alphabet cookies (only had to open two packs to get the right letters!) are sitting on Mini Slim Jims and some Indian Corn. He'll also get a frozen yogurt tube in his bag and his box of juice and an apple.
The British sci fi classic comedy Red Dwarf returns to television tonight and
to celebrate the beginning of the tenth season we've decided to do a hop of edible geekery!
In case you're unfamiliar with the episode or just need a refresher because it first aired in 1989, here's a clip:
The lunch, of course, is a tribute to Arnold J. Rimmer (played by the amazing Chris Barrie).
The large section of the EasyLunchbox has quiche topped with the quote from his shirt in cheese.
The top right has turkey sausages in the shape of the H on his forehead.
The top left has frosted brownies for no other reason except that I wanted brownies.
Now, don't be a Smeg Head and hop over to Oh!Bento to see what's in store there!
(and if that link isn't live yet, head over to Bento For Kidlet!!!)
John loves the If You Give ... series by Laura Numeroff. He has a field trip coming up to one of the local pumpkin farms so when I saw the book It's Pumpkin Day, Mouse! at the drugstore, I knew that he had to have it. I was thinking that any lunch that would be made from it would be done for the field trip, but he insisted that he needed it for Wednesday instead and even picked out which pumpkin!
The pumpkin is a bologna and cheese sandwich on honey wheat bread and Mouse is drawn on to a piece of cheddar. "Surprised" is cut out of colby cheese. He also has a Mini Slim Jim, clementine segments, and some Halloween shaped LifeSaver Gummies.
Another fun lunch thanks to the new CuteZCute cutter set! As soon as the package was opened John took one look at the pig cutter and thought of Angry Birds -- so here's his first Angry Birds lunch of the school year!
The pig is bologna and cheese. There are also Angry Bird Cheese Nips crackers and fruit snacks and an Angry Bird ring on his cheese stick. Yogurt raisins are representing the eggs and there are also grapes simply because John loves grapes!
