It's on!

Have you ever stumbled onto something, maybe a friend introduced you to something new, or you read a blog post about something you’ve never heard of before and thought “wow, I could really get into that!”? I have. It was like that for me with natural childbirth. I talked briefly to a pregnant friend who recommended that we take Bradley classes when I mentioned we were looking for child birth classes. Everything I read about Bradley made perfect sense to me. Before we even signed up for the classes I knew we would have natural childbirth if at all possible, I just needed to take the classes to figure out how. And we did by the way… have natural childbirth with both my daughters. This happened to my Mom too; I remember the night she came home from a Creative Memories home party and with excitement in her voice described a tiny paper cutter and scissors with blades that cut designs (this was years and years ago before anyone had even heard of our now modern day scrapbooking & before it was in craft stores… sheesh what did Michaels even have before scrapbooking?!). That was the beginning of what become a hobby, business, and a passion of mine (which has since been replaced by sewing) and it even spread to the rest of my family including my Aunt who runs a scrapbook business and recently launched their 2nd line of brand new scrapbooking products, Mud Puddles. Okay so what’s this got to do with anything?! You guessed it; I’ve stumbled onto a new obsession.

I was looking for no-waste options for Elle’s lunches that she’ll take to school and discovered bento. Bento is the Japanese word for lunch. It’s the way children and adults take their lunch in Japan. This post is already getting long, so I’m just going to give you a link to this great site that has tons of info about it so you can do some exploring of your own and read more about this way of packing a lunch that encourages children to eat healthy foods and try new things and helps us all with portion control. I’m all about bento! I have a “thing” for spatial agreement… a bordering on OCD “thing” for it. And, of course there’s my pesky creative side that isn’t particular about satisfaction in whatever form it presents itself. Visions of healthy foods shaped into happy little animals, arranged in whimsical fashion, neatly nestled in shallow containers of various sizes, dance in my head… and on whatever scraps of paper I can find. I’m disproportionately excited about this whole thing, especially considering I’ve only ever actually made 2 bentos. But I’m ready to get this bento thing started with the debut of my first bentos:


I made these for Elle and me to eat on the plane on our way to IL. Elle’s is a peanut butter and marshmallow fluff (speaking of pandora’s box… this was her first taste of fluff… I bet you can guess whether she liked it or not ;)) sandwich with a cloud shape cut out of the top piece of bread so that the fluff peaks through and a fruit leather plane. She also had grapes, pretzels in a silicone cupcake wrapper (so they wouldn’t get soggy from any of the moisture in the grapes), and 2 string cheeses. Mine was the same minus the marshmallow fluff & plane… although I did add in the bits of left over fruit leather after I took the picture ;)… and I added wasabi soy almonds mmmm!

Have you heard of bento before? Were you ever introduced to something and just knew right away it was going to become a new interest? Let me know....