Last week, before the fabulous birthday torte cake, we took the kids to a kiddie amusement park near us called The Land of Make Believe that has an amazing water park called Pirate's Cove geared to the under 10 set and their parents. In the interest of both healthy food choices and budget consciousness, I hastily packed a picnic lunch for all four of us that consisted of some of my standbys from packing lunches for the kids. My friend commented, "I'm sure they were all in bento boxes," but I was in a rush and family style sufficed considering we are, by most descriptions, a family.
I packed three sandwiches: one smoked turkey with white American cheese, one maple ham and turkey with baby Swiss cheese, and one baked ham with baby Swiss, all on standard grocery store variety whole wheat bread. I cut the sandwiches into square quarters since my kids usually only eat about one quarter each. They were cute and the right size for little hands. Also in our lunch were two kinds of fruit, strawberries and green grapes, carrot and green pepper slices, goldfish crackers and pretzels, and chocolate chip and oatmeal cookies. To drink I packed two different flavors of Gatorade and some plastic cups.
While our lunch itself was kind of run of the mill, I am quite proud of the fact that there was very little waste. The two containers of Gatorade were the only disposables, which we recycled. I calculated the total cost of our lunch and it was a total of about $13.00. That's what I call ECO! I have to confess, however, that ended up buying french fries only because they are so darn good at this place, but otherwise, we didn't spend anything more than the cost of admission.
Believe it or not, the kids didn't really complain about the packed lunch as much as I would have thought. The fact that there were at least a hundred (no exaggeration) coolers there besides ours reinforced the concept of bringing your own lunch, so I think they felt that they were in good company with lunch from home. At the first signs of whining, I reminded them that we were going out to dinner in the evening for the birthday celebration and that we are going to the Jersey Shore in two weeks where they can gorge themselves on junk since my mother-in-law is in charge.
Since I don't have a picture of the food, I thought I would include this shot. They are on a pirate ship in the middle of a massive kiddie pool. It was so much fun!
2 comments:
The boy looks tied to the pole, like the pirates have captured him and now he's waiting for Captain Hook to decide his fate!
He kind of does. I won't mention it to the little one. She might actually do that.
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