In case you missed last week's Mega event at Kroger it's held over for another week. Just buy 10 items from the list and you get $5 off your bill. While I'll admit that most of the items aren't on my usual shopping list this did allow me to take a break from my baking schedule and buy some snacks for the kidlet's school lunches. In fact, I think I have enough snack now to make it to Spring Break. I'll hit the store again this week because I had the great fortune to get two $1/3 Catalina's for Quaker Rice Quakes which get me two-thirds of the way through another mega-deal.

If you're thinking about what you might need to buy for Super Bowl snacks here are some things on the list:
Philadelphia Cream Cheese
Triscuits
Goldfish Crackers - great for school lunch, too:)
Rotel
Hormel Chili
Hebrew National Beef Franks
Pepsi Brand Soft Drinks

And well, there are just so many more on the list. I stocked back up on hot dogs the first week since we'd gone through the last from the freezer over Winter Break. I also got deli meat for school lunches. Anyway, it was one of those shopping trips where it might not have made a great many meals but it was a great week to restock and sometimes that's a Cool Idea.

Yesterday I looked at how much it costs me to make lunches for Comfort and Joy to take to school each day. I spend $2.53 for two lunches each day which is significantly less than the $3.43 which is the national average that parents spend on the lunches with which they send their kids to school.

Would it sometimes be easier to send $2 to school and let them eat with their class? Sure. And sometimes they do. Joy eats with her class once a week as part of her development plan. Comfort probably buys lunch once a month just for fun.

One of the reasons I make their lunches is that I can control what they are going to eat and make sure that it has some nutritional value. I can say that our school does a good job of making nice food for the kids and it starts out as real ingredients and not as food in frozen compartments but it's still institutional food. Also, we try to drink organic milk and juice when possible and that's not an option at school.

It's important to pay attention to the food our children eat at school. Slow Foods USA has information about school food nutrition and a way to write to your elected officials if you're interested in making your voice heard. If you're looking for menus and recipes to help build your kids lunch hop on over to The Lunch Box. And if you want a very illuminating view of school lunch from the inside out hop on over to Fed Up with School Lunch which is a blog being done by a school teacher who is eating what her high school kids eat every day and writing about it.

We've all heard that making sure that tummies are full is the first step to being able to fill up brains but I don't think we want to fill their tummies with just anything. Let's make sure that we're giving them a good start and helping them to build good habits. Personally, I think that's a really Cool Idea!

A newsletter came home from school a few weeks ago that said that the average cost of the lunch that a parent sends to school with their child is $3.43. The newsletter's point was that school lunch at $2/ day was cheaper and nutritionally just as good as what a parent would send.

It got me to thinking about how much I was spending on lunch for Comfort and Joy. I was pretty sure it was less - and significantly less- but I've been working to quantify it. For those of you who know who much I enjoy math you'll get a kick out of this. Yes, I'm using Excel and because thankfully it's doing the math for me.

First of all, I took into consideration the items that go into their lunches everyday. My girls eat the same sandwich every day. I tried to mix it up at first but they're toddlers. They don't like a lot of variety.

Milk [organic] for both girls: $0.96
Juice [organic] for Comfort for snack time: $0.20
Bread [3 slices]: $0.10 [Joy only takes half a sandwich each day]
slice of cheese: $0.09
slice of ham: $0.06
Peanut butter: 0.01 [bought on sale and with a Kroger coupon so I paid $0.45 for a 16 oz. jar. It's lasted almost 3 months so far.]
Jelly: $0.01 [This may seem low but Kroger brand jelly on half a sandwich - the jar has lasted over 3 months so far. I probably have another 2 weeks left before I need more.]

So everyday costs are $1.43 total for both girls.

Then there are the other items I put in which aren't always consistent:
baby carrots: $0.07
fruit cups: $0.22
clementines: $0.47 [this is a whole clementine and they each get half]
Goldfish crackers: $0.10 [I stockup when they're on sale for $0.88/ bag]
cookies: $0.42

My plan for building their lunches is a vegetable or a fruit [not both] and crackers or cookies [not both] and I usually alternate who gets the cookies and crackers each day and there's only cookies twice a week - at most.

So the average cost for "others" is probably $0.65-1.00 at the high end and $0.25 -.45 at the low end. This is a total for both girls/ per day.

And, I don't want to forget the start up costs of their reusable BYO Lunch bags, fruit cups, and cool packs. The total for all of this was $18.49 which I divided by the 180 days of school so it comes to $0.10/ day.

So, how much does it cost me to make lunch for Comfort and Joy each day? I decided to take the most expensive option of 'others' [which would be cookies and fruit cup - not that I'd probably pick that option but there you go] and plug a $1 into the formula:
$1.43 for daily stuff
$1.00 for 'other'
$0.10 for start up expenses
$2.53 = how much I spend each day for two school lunches

Not only is this significantly less than the national average but I think I do a fairly good job of a) sending food that is good for them to eat and b) sending food that they'll eat.

What do you remember taking to school for lunch? What do you pack for your kids lunch? Have you figured out how much you spend on school lunch?