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To make it easier to get ready for daycare, elementary school (I see you, new kindergarten families!), and just feeding everyone in the middle of the day, I have a really great Q&A for you today. These are your top kids lunch questions and I hope they are a start at providing reassurance and usable info to make everything a little easier.
My kiddo is entering kindergarten and I need to know which food keeps well for hours in lunchboxes? I’m lost.
—Sarah
This is actually one of the most common questions I get each year and the answer is simple. If you pack ANY foods in a lunchbox, just plan to pack it into an insulated lunch bag with two ice packs. Place one under the lunchbox and one on top to surround the lunchbox within the bag and you are good to go.
(This Amazon list has all of my favorite lunchboxes, insulated bags, ice packs, and containers.)
If you are worried about the ice packs staying frozen, opt for thicker ones.
When we pack lunches in the morning, usually, the max amount of time until the kids eat the food is 5 hours—and often it’s a lot quicker than that. Which means we do not have to stress so much about this part.
Otherwise, coming up with ideas for lunches that kids will enjoy can take some time, but it helped me a ton to make a running list and keep it on my fridge so I was never starting from scratch in the morning.
So every time I packed a lunch my kids liked a lot, I wrote it on the list that I can simply glance at when I need an idea.
This is my list of go-to favorite kids lunches that are easy to pack, and that hold up well.
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