Blurry Picture today.  After snapping the photo (and bento in process of being devoured) I discovered that the camera that I’ve been using for oh, I don’t know, but years anyway, has a focus setting for close ups.  I’ll try that for the next one 😉

Jicama, carrots and celery.  Honeydew and mango stars.  Cream cheese and jam on whole wheat flatout rolls. I ended up having to give him a little bit of dip (duh!) so next time I’d likely leave out the celery so a dip cup would fit.  As much as I like jicama, I’d never actually given it to the kidlet.  He ate it all up.

What I learned:  Jam rolls are disasterously messy. I may need an oshibori container for a damp cloth! 

This is also a smaller box than I’ve been using (460ml instead of 650).  This size is what is recommended for the 3-5 year old, but my 5 year old has quite a healthy appetite.  He is used to eating a small snack between breakfast and lunch, and I’m guessing they don’t provide that in Kindergarten, so I’m worried he will be starving by lunch.

I’m having trouble controlling my bento spending habit.  I don’t have the money to spare.  But I keep getting sucked into the cute things.  Especially adorable are the various soy sauce bottles.  They don’t hold much; basically a single serving of soy sauce or vinegar, etc.  Since the traditional japanese bento will have rice, etc, I guess soy sauce containers make sense.  However, we aren’t eating traditional food in ours — just american style lunches, packed in the bento style.  Soy sauce bottles are nearly useless to us (He does like lemon pepper as a seasoning, and I can put that in them, carefully.  They make specific containers for shaking seasonings though).  But I have like 50 of them in from plain to some little animal lids and others in cute little shapes.  They are usually very inexpensive, so its easy to justify to myself, but cheap doesn’t really matter if it won’t even be used!  So I keep finding myself having to exert true willpower not to buy any more soy sauce bottles (or any other bento accessory for that matter).  Although I will admit that if these little ribbon, crown and hat picks  were ever back in stock, I’d snap them up in a heart beat.  I’ve seen folks using them in thier bentos and they are ridicuously adorable stuck in the top of an egg with a smily face, and so on!