Have you Ceena?

Ok. Here are some of my lunches lately. This particular lunch includes: carrots, cut ranch with pesto sauce tortilla roll with cheese and pepperoni granola bar, cut into bite sizes potato chips, low sodium It's also packed in a peachtree playthings box, which reminds me of the easylunchboxes, with 3 divided compartments and a lid.

  So here we have another lunch for Aiden: ham and cheese sandwich, cut into circles Tostitos bite sized tortilla chips, the circle shaped ones salsa, in a waterproof container a banana muffin (homemade) two cookies (homemade) two soft pretzels This is packed in the Sistema snack attack duo box.        Here is another one that I packed for Aiden: Tortilla chips Salsa in the Sistema to go dressing container Raisins apple slices pretzels pepperoni (his absolute favorite lunch meat) turkey rolls I'm still working on getting him to eat more vegetables, so I am hiding a lot in my salsa. It is chunky and full of onions, peppers, tomatoes, and cilantro. I often hide the veggies so my kids don't gripe.

This was created solely for the purpose of making sure my husband actually packs a lunch, and not a bunch of sugary snacks. I know, I know, we've all been there!

There is no question about it: summers are just as scary for mommies as they are nostalgically longed for. For one, there is always the chance that your kid is going to forget everything he learned the previous school year. How will we keep up their academic edge? And there is always the fear that the week that you can afford of summer camp will not be enough and that the kids will get lazy and loose themselves in electronic gadgets. (My worst nightmare) On the other side, I hate the hustle and bustle of busy school mornings, and the thought of summer and the living's easy is oh-so-tempting. So, in order to tackle the boredom of time off, and to make sure my kids stay on a schedule, I made up "mom camp". This is what our schedule looks like: This was super easy to do. I think I bought these at the teacher section of my local Dollar Tree. (They have great educational tools, by the way). And I printed out simple clip art with their accompanying bold word. I also made ...

So, it's July. I'm seeing a fall set-up in 90+ degree weather in most Florida chain stores. I can't even fathom the idea of a sweater or boot right now. I still have a sunburn from watering my thirsty lawn. However, this is far from what excites me about this time of year. It's the geekery involved in school supply shopping, and the excitement of having the boys back in school. Since as far back as I can recall, I have always LOVED the prep work of back to school. Not the actual going to school and mingling with mortals of a different kind than I, but just the good stuff, the pens and pencils, and the backpacks and the gadgets. Ah. Browsing the halls of an Office Depot still bring back that childish excitement. Now that both of my boys are going to school (James in Pre-k, and Aiden in Kindergarten) I get to do twice the school shopping (double whammy). FUN. So, I've browsed. I've done my homework and have searched for all the deals. I've read the reviews....