High Maintenance Mom

It's mid-July and time for our favorite stores to crank up the air conditioning and put out the Back-to-School clothes and accessories for that wow, I love to wear wool and I definitely need a new Trapper Keeper feeling. One of the key items you may need for school is a lunch box. We've tried numerous types of lunch boxes and have realized that there have been no real functional changes since we were kids. So if you are trying to decide which one will be best for you, "I just want to say one word - just one word.... 'plastics"...

Here is how I came to the plastics conclusion so many years after viewing The Graduate. It started when I was told my oldest needed a lunch box and I found an insulated mini cooler that looked perfect. What I didn't realize was that while I was thinking about keeping the food cool, my son was learning how to unpack and "repack" his food. After a few days of washing the container every night, it started to smell. Here is a sample conversation from that time.

Pocket Physicist: Something smells.
Me: Yeah, it's the lunch box.
Pocket Physicist: No, something really smells.
Me: I know, it's the lunch box. I've been trying to clean it but the milk just seeps in.
Pocket Physicist: Are you cleaning it every night?
Me: (now freaking out over the fact that I have tried to clean it every night and he was standing around reading as if the highlight of my day was to come home and work on getting the milk out of the lining of the lunch box) What do you think? You think I like the smell? You think I want our son to be known as the one with the smelly lunch box? Do you think I want to scar him forever over this?
Pocket Physicist: Just buy him another lunch box. (barely lifting his head from the magazine)

So I bought a new soft case one from Old Navy. It was really cute and I was determined to make it work. A few months later it also smelled. I then had three lunch boxes that I would rotate so they could dry out inbetween use. I'm sure the teachers thought I was trying to make everyone crazy as I found innovative ways to label each one (name on index card material covered in contact paper with a hole punched in it for hanging off the bags - only for the first child).

I asked others in the classroom if their lunch boxes smelled. It appeared that I, I mean my son, was the only one with a smelly lunch box. I wondered if my nose was too sensitive. Lots of other smells bothered me and we were thinking about getting pregnant again. When I could smell his lunch box on my hands after carrying it to the cubby, I no longer cared why I could smell it all day and I bought the plastic Thomas lunch box. B loves it and I wipe it down at night. He's had it for a year and has cracked it, in a useable way, from shoving the containers in at weird angles. That's another issue, you can pack everything in the lunch box in an orderly manner but your child will most likely not even notice the intricacies of a packing problem.

You can purchase the Thomas or other plastic lunch boxes from Amazon.com or from lunchboxes.com. If you can't find an image you like, you can often pull the original sticker off the lunch box and put on your own stickers or designs. I also recommend the Cyropack Flexible Ice Blanket Sheets which we cut into smaller sheets to fit in the lunch box. A container of frozen vegetables also helps keep the rest of the lunch box contents cool.