Do you want to break away from sandwhiches… or just the PB&J?  A fun idea (esp. now that it’s October!) is to try some cooking with seasonal fruits and veggies.  Pumpkin soup, date bread with cream cheese, roasted pumpkin seeds, etc. to accompany your regular lunch.  And, of course, there are all kinds of wonderful Fall soups (bean, potato, split pea… the list goes on forever) that could be nice for lunches or could at least go along with sandwhiches.  I don’t know how old your kids are, or whether you want to get them involved in the cooking.  At a certain point, my mom just handed lunches over to my brother and I and we had a blast with that (with a bit of a time-cap on lunch-making and eating since we were homeschooling and it could have been easy for lunch to just eat away the whole afternoon).  Anyways, we had the rules—if you make it, you eat it; if you make it, you clean it up; and I think we had 2 hours max for cooking, eating, and cleaning.  Things got REALLY creative sometimes (grits mixed with spinach dip and cheese balls, anyone?!) but we had a fabulous time, learned (and taught ourselves) to cook, and my brother went on to become a professional chef!

I found the GREATEST “cookbook” at Williams Sonoma the other day, and it has changed our lunch lives! At least me and the kids—the hubs still gets a dinner-style meal every day for lunch! It’s a bit pricey, but I found it on sale and it’s totally worth it:

http://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/3640489/?catalogId=50&bnrid=3180501&cm_ven=Shopping&cm_cat=Froogle&cm_pla=Cooks_Tools&cm_ite=3640489

It’s called “The Lunch Box” and has some really great ideas of how to make easy, non-PB&J lunches. I’d fallen into that rut, too, and since my kids’ MDO program doesn’t allow PB, it was cream cheese and jelly sandwiches EVERY day. Now we do wraps, salads, yogurt parfaits, trail mix, and other fun foods. At least peek at the book next time you’re in Williams Sonoma—it will at least inspire you to try something new!!

Here is a website I like to frequent for kid-friendly lunch ideas :http://family.go.com/food/pkg-cooking-for-kids/
My 4 yr old and 1-1/2 yr old have liked several.

Can’t think of the best site I found…but someone recently tipped me off to googling daycare lunch menu.  Came up with tons of ideas we just started using to get out of our rut

Here are some ideas from a mother of 7. I’ve tried many with succes. There are only 4 of us (soon to be 5) but these ingredients can easily be doubled, tripled.
http://family.go.com/food/pkg-low-cost-recipes-from-a-real-mom/

Roast chicken:
Buy one big old roasting chicken (I get them on sale at the store, frozen, for six bucks).

Put one peeled white onion, a few stalks of celery, and five cloves of garlic inside the bird (be sure to remove all the innards!).  Rub the outside with olive oil, rosemary, thyme, salt, and pepper.  Add two cups of water to the pan.  Bake for 2-2 and a half hours (according to weight) at 350.  Remove onion, celery, and garlic before serving (they keep the chicken moist during baking!).  Beautiful presentation-  great for company or a special dinner and won’t break the bank.

Serve with potatoes or rice (both cheap!) and whatever veggie is in season!

We had a fridge like that in our last house and Mr. Clean Magic Eraser worked great for me!

Yes, we do frequent handwashing here. I use the hand sanitizer when we are out and about and first thing when we come home or have access to a sink and soap we wash our hands. Also, I put a probiotic powder in their morning smoothies (this could easily be mixed into milk or juice too) and give them a half teaspoon of fish oil every other day. I think all of these things combined help our family to stay healthy during cold and flu season. I purchase Carleson’s liquid fish oil and the powdered children’s probiotic from Vitacost.  My husband and I take the fish oil too and my husband takes a probiotic called the Pearl.

I often use colloidal silver to ward off colds and flus for our kids.  It’s simply distilled water with pure silver in it.  Silver kills bacteria.  A tsp. of that per day during flu season, or a little more when people are under the weather.  You’ll be amazed.  Plus since I have an aerator on my bottle, I can spray it all over my door handles, countertops, bathroom sinks to kill the germs.  It merely has to have contact for 6 minutes, and you’ll have a germ free surface.

Hand sanitizer rocks. We keep it all over the house and in the cars…AND it’s great for removing grime and especially sharpie and other marker stains and grime…love it!!