Mom, What's In my Lunch Box?

I have always paid for my children to get school lunch, or the last few years I have been one of "those moms ", my children have qualified for free or reduced lunch. This year we didn't qualify anymore, not because we had a huge increase in pay, but just a few dollars. Well with gas going up, the cost of food at the grocery stores and every thing else you can think of, I couldn't see paying $3.50 and up for lunch everyday for 5 children, we were looking at About $88.00 a week just for lunch , that didn't include breakfast. I told my children we just could not do that, and they would be taking their lunch from home.
The first week was fun, they had new lunch boxes, Hannah Montana, High School Musical, and just a plain red and black for my 14 year old son, PLEASE! The next hurdle was what to get them to drink? I wanted something low in sugar, but with some kind of nutritional value, none of them really ever liked getting milk at lunch. Well a friend of mine told me about the Sugar free Hawaiian Punch Singles To Go. 5 calories per serving, 5 mg of sodium, 1 g of carbs, and best of all 100% of the RDA of vitamin C, woohoo. I found them in 5 flavors and they come 8 servings to a box, but those sticks as I call them make 16.9 fluid ozs, my kids lunch bottles are 8oz, so we actually get 16 servings. Best of all I bought them at Walgreens for $1.00 a box, can you say 6 cent per serving? The only way to beat that would be having coupons, but alas I couldn't find any.
Now back to my lunch delimena, what's that you say? You didn't say anything about a delimena. Well let me tell you folks, I have found out it is hard to find something for lunch that will please all 5 kids, 5 days a week. They got tired of bologna, turkey, and ham real quickly. I was able to supplement my middle and high schoolers boxes with hot pockets, and the smaller microwavable entrees, like beef and cheese, stroganoff, etc. but no such luck with my elementary schoolers, they aren't allowed to use the microwave. Heck I can't even give the their favorite, peanut butter and jelly, because of the chance that some children may have nut allergies. I understand this to a point, but why can't my child just be sat away from the child with allergies. I am lactoise intolerent but I still buy milk. Oh well, no use fighting that battle here.
I've tried reading the articles about keeping lunches interesting, well that might just work, if you have all day to do nothing but stay in the kitchen and cut out the cutsie little designs, and cut the veggies into exotic shapes, I can do that, "NOT"!
I guess I am going to have to check on the price of K-Rations, LOL, rub them or shake, I forget which, and they self heat. Now that would be nice, and they couldn't taste any worse than my kids say the cafeteria food does. Can they?
So what's a mom to do? When and if I figure it out, I promise to do an update to this Blog, in the meantime.....Talk To MY Heart, tell me what you do for your kid's lunches at school. Who knows maybe someone out there has the answer, I sure could use it before my kid's go on lunch strike, then I'll be "one of those moms who don't feed their kids"

Pushing The Future

My friend and mentor Anjie Henley at http://flbyu.blogspot.com/ gave us a link to day to an awesome blog and video that could potentially save us all a bunch of money in our gas tanks. I have heard all of our political parties ideas about new energy sources. They have talked about drilling, solar energy, clean coal, but the thing I haven't heard is what can help us now? Everything they are talking about is 7 or more years down the road, and I personally can not survive another 7 years with these kinds of Gas prices, and everything else going up. I was so impressed with this technology I want to know more and quickly. You can view the video here, and find out more, I personally think it is brilliant and I am proud to say this awesome invention was dreamed up by one of our Freelancebyu members, spouses, so it's kind of all in the family.
http://gasavings.blogspot.com/2008/10/gas-savings-in-our-future-push-hog.html

After you have a chance to view come on back and Talk to my heart, let me know what you think about this new invention.

Kid's Eat Free

How are you all doing this wonderful Friday/Saturday? First I want to say my prayers are with the people of Texas, and other areas being affected by Ike at this time, please stay safe and evacuate.

Now, I wanted to share a wonderful site that I just found, it is awesome and will really help those of us who have children under 10, and those of us with large families, like our 5 children. So check it out here ....
http://www.mykidseatfree.com/

Here is an excerpt from their home.
80% of Kid's Eat Free specials are only advertised by Word of Mouth! If you know of a Kid's Eat Free special not listed here, please let us know so we can add them to our site.

Talk to my heart, let me know how you like this goodie, I love it, anything to help defray the cost of gas right now.

School Is In, I Am Out!

Ok, so it seems like forever and a day, but I am finally back. A my title says school has finally started back, but I am so out of it from running myself ragged, trying to get all five of my ankle biters back to school.
This year seemed much harder than previous years for me. For one thing there was much more paperwork this year. I began filling it out when the first two got home at two pm, on the first day. I finished at five am the next morning. Now mind you, that was in between helping with homework, yes you read right homework the first day! Cooking dinner, picking up the 14 year old from football practice, going to try and find the last of the school supplies for each class. I had all the basics, but you know each teacher has their own list too. Marble notebooks are my enemy this year. Every store in my area was sold out, and now two weeks later, I finally found five at my local Foodlion. My children fought over those precious five last night. Seems the teachers are jumping onto the children for not having them, Momma Bear is ready to jump the teachers eeerrrrgggg!
So how has your school year started? I can't just say, how has your child's school year started, because we are just as much a part of the school as our children now, it is expected. It is called shared responsibility here, I call it the teachers not wanting to deal myself. I can count on my fingers the number of times my parents ever went to our schools. I am not saying that was a good thing, but they both worked full time jobs, and just dealing with life was sometimes too much for them to handle. Now most of us work full time jobs, but we are expected to work after those full time jobs with our kids and the schools. What if we expected the teachers to go to work for us, and teach our children? Think they would still expect so much from us then?
I am all for being involved in my children's lives, in and out of school. I have always helped with homework, attended school functions, I am not so much into PTO, but I do pay my dues. That is not enough anymore, now the kids bring home more homework than they do schoolwork in school. Lord help you if your child doesn't have a computer at home! That is paramount to child abuse! We can't bake cupcakes for the class anymore, now everything has to be store bought. Have you watched the specials about how dirty restaurants, and grocery stores are? They are worried about baking at home, to me that is a joke.
I really didn't intend for this blog to be a rant today, I was just going to catch up on what has been going on the past few weeks, well the best laid plans and all that rot! I do hope everyone has gotten settled in, and that you all survived the summer with few scratches.
Well I am out of here until the next time, hopefully it won't be so long, now that I have all this free time between, between school work, football games, yadda, yadda.........HELP!
Talk to my heart, let me know how you feel about what the schools expect from parents nowadays.

Program for 6th to 9th Graders

I wanted to share this item with my readers. As a parent of 2 teens, and 2 tweens, I feel your pain. How do we keep our children out of trouble, teach them how to make the right decisions? Well when you find out please let me know. I use every resource I can find, and it takes all of them and then some in todays society. I ordered one of these for my children, so we will all find out together how effective the program is. I promise to come back and let you know what I think, if you promise to Talk To My Heart, and let me know what you think about the program, and how your children reacted to it. So TTYL on this one. http://www.rightdecisionsrightnow.com/educators_new/afterschoolkit.asp

New club for Girls and Moms

I was very impressed with a new club that will be starting up on September 2nd. I grew up with Precious Moments figurines, and knick nacs, calendars etc. Well now they have a club created just for us girls, and best of all it helps Moms and their Daughters interact, so that we can teach our girls good moral values. How cool is that? You can preregister and the first 2000, may get a chance for some freebies. Here is the information, I hope you are as impressed with this as I am. Talk To My Heart, and tell me what you think after you check it out. I preregistered all my young ladies, and can't wait until September 2nd!

http://www.momselect.com/registration/pgc.php

Thank you for your interest in the Precious Girls ClubTM from Precious Moments®! The Precious Girls Club website and companion book series offers a world of joy and goodness created for precious little girls! The series reinforces the values you teach in your own home and most importantly, encourages little girls to be little girls. If you qualify for the giveaway, we will send you two sample copies of the first book in the series, A Little Bit of Faith. In the meantime, be sure to check out the companion website at www.preciousgirlsclub.com. The site is open for pre-registration now, and the full site launches on September 2nd. And since your fellow moms are always looking for great new books and toys for their families, be sure to share the Precious Girls Club with other moms - we're sure they'll thank you for the tip!

Awesome contest for you

My friend and mentor has a great contest running right now on her blog, and it's ezypeezey to enter and win. All of us are using more coupons now to help save some nickels and dimes in todays economy, and this contest will make those coupon savings easier than ever. I hope I win one!
Heres what ya have to do.........

• FLBYU IS GIVING AWAY 5 of these THIS MONTH! GOTTA BE IN IT TO WIN IT! ITS EASY TO GET IN JUST MAKE A COMMENT! EXTRA ENTRIES CAN BE EARNED (scroll down for those details)
  
• all you have to do is comment on this post on my blog for ONE ENTRY!
  
• 
  

HTTP://WWW.FLBYU. BLOGSPOT. COM

GOOD LUCK ! 5 LUCKY WINNERS WILL BE SELECTED VIA RANDOM GENERATOR on SEPT 10th!

• Holds up to 150 coupons
• Velcro latch quickly attaches to shopping cart
• Pre-printed category tabs make organizing coupons easy
• Best selling coupon organizer on the market today
• Size: 4 3/4"tall x 7 1/2"wide x 1/2"deep

This Coupon Organizer is the perfect way to hold and organize your coupons in one convenient place. Our coupon organizer will pay for itself in just a few trips to the grocery store because you will easily be able to see the coupons you have. The coupon holder features a black vinyl case with clear pockets that can hold up to 150 coupons in 12 compartments. The coupon organizer also features 24 tabs to help you stay organized, and it attaches to the shopping cart for easy use


EXTRA ENTRIES

• if you have a blog and make a post about this contest or my site..... you can also send me the link to your post (via comment here) and you will get 2nd entry! DONT HAVE A BLOG? MAKE ONE! ITS FREE HERE ON BLOGGER! HAVE 2 BLOGS? POST ON BOTH!
  
• 
  
• ADDITIONAL ENTRIES can be made by Posting about this contest or my blog or site on another site / forum/blog and post the link on my blog, YEP another entry!

LAST BUT NOT LEAST, add a link to your EBAY ABOUT ME PAGE or YOUR MYSPACE / FACEBOOK ETC and you can get another entry!
--
Living Lavishly For Less
www.freelancebyu. com

As Anjie would say, "Go Get Em"