Happy Little Great Pumpkin and Happy Little Elephant Lunches

Happy Little Great Pumpkin and Happy Little Elephant  Lunches 

These lunch:

packed in EasyLunchbox container

pumpkin sandwich with fruit leather face

carrots w ranch dip in rectangle silicone liner

apple slices

spider web chips

melt-in-your-mouth pumpkin candies 

The Peanuts character stuff is actually a cake decoration.  Lucky me, I happened to be grocery shopping on the day the bakery department was clearing out their cake supplies.  These babies and some random football guys were on the clearance shelves in the back of the store!  There was only one Peanuts set, unfortunately, so the kids will have to take turns but I think I can use it somehow at Christmas too!  Not to mention just the everyday Charlie Brown lunches!  $2.59 well spent!  

Talking about the bakery department brings me to another TOP SECRET tip for acquiring cupcake picks.  So...ya' know how the bakery department sells cupcakes?  Some have the decorative picks or plastic rings already on them while some are just plain cupcakes.  Sometimes I'll buy a set of the plain cupcakes and oh-so-nicely ask the bakery worker if I could please have picks for them?  Then I'll explain that I'm actually just after the picks themselves to use in my kids' lunches to poke onto things like grapes or cheese cubes, so could I please choose 12 different picks?    As long as they're not busy I've never been denied and it's a fairly cheap way of getting a few different picks without buying packages of each of them.   

The bottom photo shows a spider ring decoration and a cat cupcake pick.  The pumpkin candies are in a silicone food liner purchased from an online bento supply website.  The Halloween chips are from Aldi.  My kids know pretty well to just leave the toys or decorations in their lunch containers and bring them home.  I can't think of a single lunch thing we've ever lost at school in the whole time I've been doing this.  Since there is very little to no trash from bento lunches, most days they don't even need to visit the trash can at all.

This lunch:

packed in an EasyLunchbox container

mama and baby elephant cut with sandwich cutter

heart cut from fruit leather

Trader Joe's cereal bar (cut in half)

sunflower seeds in heart shaped silicone liner

carrots w ranch dip

grapes w elephant fork

Who doesn't love elephants?  The elephant sandwich cutter is adorable and it cuts the baby in a way that it can come out whole apart from the mama.  SO adorbs!  My eldest had a stuffed elephant as his lovey since he was a baby so they've always held a special place in our family.  I purchased the elephant bento fork in the grapes several years ago and haven't seen them lately so I think they're probably out of stock.  I linked below to another set of animal forks that comes with an elephant.  They're not the exact same but I actually also own this set and they are very cute!

As a reminder or for new readers, I get a very small percentage of anything purchased through these links and I will donate 100% of this to charities related to foster care.  You can click on the links to purchase those items.  If you click my links here and search around and find other things to buy I (ahem, kiddos in foster care) will receive the percentage on anything you buy that day and not just the items in the link!  So thanks!!!