Making the Lunch Box Special (5 unique ways show the love)

With summer coming to an end it’s time to start preparing for back to school. Every parent wants to make sure their children feel loved when they are at school. Not being there with them can make it hard to help brighten their day. But don’t worry; you can still bring a smile to your child’s face by being fun and creative with their lunch!

Today I am teaming up with Shamrock Farms and Walmart to promote their back-to-school initiative for healthy and fun lunches, by packing one of three great milk flavors for your child’s midday protein punch – strawberry, chocolate or white milk!

Shamrock Farms has created Roxie’s Midday Menu to help inspire new lunch ideas for busy moms. To keep the inspiration flowing, they also launched Roxie’s Ultimate Back-To-School Sweepstakes, where one (1) lucky winner will win up to $5,000 in gift cards to stock up on back to school supplies, groceries, and a brand new wardrobe! Hurry up and enter for your chance to win.

 I recently tried their Banana Rolls with my two little ones and they were a big hit! (Fruit Bars and Healthy S’more are going on our must-try list!)

Making the Lunch Box Special

School lunches can be both fun to make and fun for your child to eat. Now that Roxie’s Midday Menu has given you some delicious food ideas, here are some great ideas that can light up your child’s lunch by showing the love in other ways:

1. Write a message! One idea for this is to draw or write a message in the side of a banana with a butter knife. By lunch time your child will be able to read the message! (Knock, knock jokes make a perfect banana message. ;))
2. Create lunch themes! Use a car theme by cutting the sandwich into a rectangle, use an apple slice for the windshield, and banana slices for the wheels.
3. Educate them! Include a note in each lunch with a “fun fact,” like “Did you know that the planet Mars is home to the tallest mountain in the solar system?”
4. Make paper fortune cookies! You can create special fortunes about something fun planed for after school or that weekend. For example, if you are going to the zoo that weekend your child’s fortune could read “A day filled with fun and animals is in your future.”
5. Give them a gift! If your child is a fan of trading cards like baseball or football cards, you could give them a fairly inexpensive gift every day. Just buy few packs of the cards and put one card, not the whole pack so you can space them out more, in their lunch each day!

Another worry for most parents is whether their child is getting the right nutrition. A well-rounded meal includes fruits, vegetables, whole-grains, protein, and dairy. I found that I wasn’t giving my children the correct daily serving of dairy as I was putting juice boxes into their lunches. One way to resolve this was to switch from juice boxes to milk since I always included fruit for them to eat. A great brand for milk is Shamrock Farms on-the-go mmmmilk.

Shamrock Farms on-the-go mmmmilks  are pure, fresh, and nutritious with no added hormones. They come in the perfect serving size of 12-oz, they are great tasting, and they also come in a great variety of flavors: 2% or whole chocolate milk, 2% strawberry milk, and whole milk. Each variety offers more than 25% of the daily recommended value of protein too!

You can find them in select Walmarts nationwide. This summer Walmart will be offering 12-oz on-the-go milks in white, chocolate, and strawberry for a low price of $1 each, so you will have plenty of inexpensive and healthy choices for your child’s lunch. You can find them in the dairy section and in some locations in promotional display cooler.

You can also enter for a chance to win a $100 Walmart gift card by leaving a comment on this post telling us your favorite way to add a little love to the lunch box.

You can find more info on Shamrock Farms at the following sites: Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

Entry Instructions:

No duplicate comments.

You may receive (2) total entries by selecting from the following entry methods:

1. Leave a comment in response to the sweepstakes prompt on this post
2. Tweet (public message) about this promotion; including exactly the following unique term in your tweet message: “#SweepstakesEntry”; and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment on this post
3. Blog about this promotion, including a disclosure that you are receiving a sweepstakes entry in exchange for writing the blog post, and leave the URL to that post in a comment on this post
4. For those with no Twitter or blog, read the official rules to learn about an alternate form of entry.

This giveaway is open to US Residents age 18 or older (or nineteen (19) years of age or older in Alabama and Nebraska). Winners will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail. The notification email will come directly from BlogHer via the sweeps@blogher.com email address. You will have 2 business days to respond; otherwise a new winner will be selected.

The Official Rules are available here.

This sweepstakes runs from 7/27/15 – 9/4/15.

Be sure to visit the Shamrock Farms brand page on BlogHer.com where you can read other bloggers’ posts!

Alice Lunsford is a freelance writer and mother of three. She has been writing professionally since 2012 on a variety of topics, ranging from parenting to business, and enjoys writing projects that creative, fun, and educational. She lives in Riverside County in Southern California with her family.