Healthy Lunches and other stuff

Our school has a canteen which opens every day for snacks, but only provides lunch orders on Fridays. So for a long time on the other four days lunches were available from the local milk bar. The problem with this is that the children would order things like sausage rolls and hot dogs for lunch.

Of course this is probably fine if it is only once a week but unfortunately there were quite a few children that were ordering these things every day. The other problem was that often these kids had not had breakfast, and the lunch orders were not delivered until 1.15pm so the kids were absolutely starving and then eating junk.

One of my friends came up with a wonderful, healthy option for those needing or wanting to buy their lunch at school. A group of volunteers take it in turns of putting together a healthy lunchbox for those who order them everyday. In this lunchbox there is two pieces of fruit, a homemade muffin, a packet of sakata rice snacks and a sandwich.

The cost of these lunchboxes is between $4 and $5 which make them really affordable. There is a choice of four different sandwich fillings.

A parent volunteer comes in every morning to put together these lunchboxes. It really doesn't take much time as the sandwiches are already made and frozen as are the muffins. They are delivered to the classrooms by around 10 am so the muffins are defrosted by morning tea time and the sandwiches by lunch time.

The kids have something healthy to eat at snack and lunch. This has got to be beneficial to their learning and behaviour for the day.

Every Tuesday I prepare the lunches for the kids. Abbey comes with me to help. She could probably do it all by herself! She is a wonderful helper and loves to chat to the office ladies, the teachers, the students, the principal, anyone who will pay attention to her really.

After making the lunches she goes to her friend Luke's house for a play. Luke is around the same age as Abbey and she adores him. She is always telling me how Luke is her best friend. She is pretty keen on Luke's mum Heidi too. She took Heidi a flower today and often insists on kissing her when we leave!

It is so nice for her to have a special friend all of her own. I find that because of the large age gap between her and her closest sibling (it's over 5 years) that she often just tags along behind the older kids and their friends. She now loves to tell her brother and sister about her special friend Luke. So cute!

In other news there was no action on the new home front the past weekend, the ground was too wet for the bobcat so hopefully this weekend will work for us. I am beginning to feel slightly nervous as there is so much work to do and we have to move out of the house we are renting in just over three months. I hope our builder works Saturdays!

Also, sadly, my washing machine has broken down. I really do not have much luck with washing machines. I have had two rather expensive, european made front loaders over the last five years and they have broken down 5 times between them. Do these companies not realize that I simply cannot cope if I am not up to date with my washing? Lucky my parents live five doors down from us, although I'm sure Mum has better things to do than my washing.

Hopefully it will be fixed really quickly.