Latest / The Rooted Family / Ep 30 | Why Packing School Lunches Feels So Hard (And How to Put Your Lunch Rhythm on Autopilot)

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Ep 30 | Why Packing School Lunches Feels So Hard (And How to Put Your Lunch Rhythm on Autopilot) · The Rooted Family

• Christian Cornish: I even think about the times that we've opened the fridge at like 7 30 in the morning, you know, 10 minutes before we have to get out the door. I'm already screaming in my head. Like just you saying that just putting my body in distress mode. Yeah, because it's like, you're already anxious about getting out the door, and then you look in the fridge and you're just staring at the fridge, wondering, okay, what can I throw into this lunchbox in the next like two minutes? And That is the recipe for like major, major stress. And no one wants to be that stress in the morning. Hi, welcome back to the Rooted Family Podcast. We are Christian and Kayla Cornish, and we're so excited that you're here today because we're talking about lunch rhythms. The kind of thing that every family has to deal with every day. Mm-hmm. So by the end of this episode, you'll have a simple framework for creating a lunch rhythm that takes the daily decision making off your plate, whether your kids go to school or eat lunch at home. Alright, Kayla, so I have a Fun question for you. Maybe it's not fun to think about because when I thought of this question, I was like, this is not actually fun for me. What was your favorite lunch as a kid growing up? I I remember my brother and I, I might have shared this with you before, but I'll share it again. So we would make these special sandwiches because my parents gave us the freedom to like pack our own lunches. And I do know this story. It involves a lot of freedom. Or just a lot of secret lunch building without our parents' knowledge. So my parents would have been like, I don't know, laying down the little kids and we're making our own lunches. And there was a part of our cupboard that held all of the ice cream toppings. So like chocolate chips and mini MMs and cinnamon sugar. And so we would make these special sandwiches. We'd butter, you know, a nice piece of white bread, put all the the ice cream toppings on the sandwich. And then that we'd take, you know, a good dose of that cinnamon sugar. I feel like every parent had A little spice thing of cinnamon sugar in their cabinet. Did you guys have one growing up? Like a little I mean we definitely had cinnamon and sugar. I not maybe put together. I feel like we had that on toasts and sandwiches all the time. Cinnamon sugar. Such a good idea. Like my I think my mom just blended it. I'd like to go do that right now, actually. And then she'd take like an old like spice jar and fill it with the cinnamon sugar. Brilliant. It is. And then she just put it on like we'd actually eat that as a sandwich, like a cinnamon sugar sandwich. yeah. We've done like the like a taco shell. Like heat it up like a like a poor man's churro. That's funny. Yeah, so we would basically doctor up our sandwich. My goodness, with all the As like a someone in my late thirties. This sounds horrific. I know, and like it's actually surprising that my parents did not catch us doing this. And it wasn't all the time. It definitely was like a special sandwich. Okay, so I'm curious to know what was your favorite lunch growing up. Well, school lunch was horrific. Like absolutely horrific in public school. Like I hated it. Uh-huh. So bad. And I got to middle school and I complained about it enough and thankfully I was an only child. my parents were very gracious and there was a deal at Subway that every Sunday you could like buy one, get one on footlongs. And so they let me go up. I would get like a really basic sub that would stay well in the fridge throughout the week. And I could have that Monday through Thursday. Wow. It stayed good that long. I mean, I'm no dietitian and so who knows if it was the right idea or not. I mean the bread didn't get soggy, like No, because I didn't dress it or do anything like that. So it just was like ham and cheese on Italian herb. Bread. Wow, you lucky dog. You had Subway four days a week. And then on Friday, I think it might have been gross pizza day, but I had to suffer through whatever Friday was at middle school. Was it the kind of pizza that came in like the little plastic bag that they like heated inside the plastic bag? I mean, you ever had that pizza bread? It wasn't handed to me that way. okay. in my elementary school, I remember actually kind of liked it, but it was like This pizza bread was in this plastic bag. I mean, that's better than like the barf that looked like was thrown on my pizza. wow. And handed to me. The adventures of school lunch. I just thought it was so fun to get hot lunch because it was such a treat in our family. I was the oldest of four and my stepbrother, so of five. And I felt like Because we didn't get hot lunch all the time. I wanted it. That's fair. I feel like our kids share that feeling because we have five in school now And you know, we send lunches with them and they never get hot lunch. Totally. So they definitely feel the same way you do. Uh-huh. Well, today we're talking about a school lunch rhythm. And in our large family, this has been a lifesaver because we spend so much time having to do that. I think it's funny talking about our childhood lunches, because most of us don't remember whether or not we had this like perfect balanced lunch. even reflecting on our lunches, I don't even remember probably most of what we eat for lunch. But we do remember if there were little notes left in our lunch boxes or special little treats. We remember the friends that we sat by with lunchtime. So we remember those things about lunch, not necessarily exactly what was prepared. And so today we're talking about lunch rhythms, but we're not building our lunch rhythms simply so that we can become more efficient parents. We're creating rhythms that allow us to nourish and love our kids without that daily scramble. And so if you're listening and you have kids, small kids, you probably relate to that sentiment that sometimes lunch can be a scramble. It can be stressful and chaotic and something that we don't want to even think about sometimes. Yeah, especially when as parents, many of us, most of you listening, probably have a job or workplace to get to. And so when you're scrambling and you're already like, I have to get these kids to school, they need to be on time. In turn, I need to be on time. This scramble becomes really, really, really stressful. And we definitely don't become the best versions of ourselves. And we create stress in us. And we talked about our last episode around having a morning rhythm in the home. And how when we have a morning rhythm that works, we leave the house ready to be the images of God that He created us to be. Not having already left. full of stress, full of anxiety, full of frustration. And so this is about allowing us to go out into the world and show up as our best selves. It's on a more consistent basis. Yeah, that's beautiful. I think that the goal here isn't to create this like perfect lunch box. The goal is to nourish our kids without carrying the mental load of lunch every single day. And I even think about the times that we've opened the fridge at like 7 30 in the morning, you know, 10 minutes before we have to get out the door. I'm already screaming in my head. Like just you saying that just putting my body in distress mode. Yeah, because it's like, my gosh, you're already anxious about getting out the door, and then you're just staring at the fridge, wondering, okay, what can I throw into this lunchbox in the next like two minutes? And That is the recipe for like major, major stress. And no one wants to be that stress in the morning. I mean, I guess you could keep it simple and just send your kids to school for hot lunch, but many of us don't choose to put our money in that way. Like we want to save money. So making lunches really is part of the equation. If you homeschool, Then definitely making lunges is part of your daily life. And so I think that we're here really to help take the exhaustion out of so many decisions when it comes to making lunges. Yeah, we've talked about the mental load, the decision fatigue of trying to make these decisions over and over and over again. And if you add the last second stress on top of it. Whew, it's just a nightmare to start your day. So we have been parents of of many kids going to school. So we've learned the hard way that's not the way we want to go about our morning. And so the lunch routine has really brought us back to a place where not only are these decisions made, our kids are involved and things flow. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And this is really what the back to school series that we've done over the last few weeks has really been about. Is about reducing the mental load, the decision fatigue. we're not trying to overhaul our entire family before the school year begins, although it kind of feels that way sometimes. I feel like you and I are walking through that right now, or we're really walking through each of our rhythms and figuring out what are we tweaking, what are we adjusting. But I think the difference between you and I today. versus somebody who maybe is new to building rhythms is that they're starting from scratch. if building rhythms is a brand new concept, you know, you're starting from the ground up designing each of these rhythms. Whereas you and I today, we've built rhythms for so many years that at the beginning of a school year, what's nice is you can just take what you've already been doing and make one or two tiny tweaks or adjustments to the rhythm. To fit this new season. And everything we talk about today is applicable to your situation. If you're a homeschooling parent, if you're a parent who sends children to school, it's all the same thought processes, all the same ideas. Really, maybe just the when you do these things will change throughout the day. But it's not actually any different. So we do want to say that up front. Like this is really applicable to everybody. Totally. And we are not perfect at this. you'll hear our rhythm in just a few moments, what our lunch rhythm looks like. And there are definitely days that we still get stressed about this. There are days that the rhythm does not work for whatever reason. or we, you know, have made the same thing many days in a row but we hopefully by just sharing our ideas and what has worked, we'll Bless your family. I would encourage you to go back and listen to the other two episodes in the series if you haven't already. The f the first one of the back to school series was episode 28, and that was on how to have a family meeting rhythm. And we do ours on Sunday nights, and you can go back to listen to how we do that in just 15 minutes every single week to keep our family on the same page. And then week two, which was last week, episode 29, we talked about the morning rhythm and how essential it is for every single family to have a morning rhythm that is so intentional, purposeful, and something that really reduces the stress in the morning. And then this week, the lunch rhythm really ties in with last week because the lunch rhythm, although we eat our lunch at noon, It really does play into our morning rhythm. And when we talk about implementing rhythms into your life or starting somewhere with a rhythm, this is a rhythm that I think every family would get a lot of bang for their buck in terms of their time. And saying, Hey, let's start somewhere with our rhythms. Where do we start first? We always say pick one rhythm and Work on it till it turns into autopilot. Yeah. And this is a rhythm that if you got on to autopilot, you would find a lot of quick instant wins within your life. Yeah. Yeah. And so we're gonna dive in today, and we don't want you to feel like if you're listening while driving in the car, that you have to take a bunch of notes. And so we do have a free guide that goes along with this episode where we share most of what we're talking about today. we break it down for you so that way you can refer to it as you build your own lunch rhythm. And so be sure to download that guide at the end of today's episode. You can find it in the show notes, and it will give you all of our lunch ideas and the structure behind this rhythm. Now I I think there are gonna be some people listening to this episode that already are kind of tuning out because they feel like they're way too free-spirited for rhythms in general, but especially having structure around like lunch. It feels like almost like can we just think of it the day of? Like, why do we need to be so hardcore? And I I do wonder if that's working for you. Like if that's your mindset, I wonder. Like, how is it going? waking up and just throwing lunch together if you are sending your kids with cold lunch or you are a homeschool parent and you, you know, approach noon and you're like, Okay, we gotta make lunch, and you don't want to think about the rhythm or the plan before. Like, genuinely, how is not planning going? And what what could you get on the other side of having a rhythm around it? Because you only have so much energy. You only hold so much capacity in a day. So if you could put this on autopilot, how much more energy would you have for spontaneity, fun, and creativity? Yeah, that's a great point. And do that in other areas. You could totally do that with lunch too sometimes. Build build spontaneity into your rhythm if you want. Like Friday is spontaneous day. Throw whatever's in the kitchen on your sandwich. Be make a special sandwich at the at the end of the week. You know, you could have that still built into your rhythm if you want. But I think that your energy, you probably would say you'd want to enjoy it in other ways. Yeah. And so put this on autopilot so you can have more fun somewhere else. Such a good point. Yeah. So why don't we start with the first part of Planning the lunch rhythm and that is deciding what lunch is actually going to be. And this is this is such a big piece of the puzzle. So walk us through maybe what our decisions have kind of looked like in this area over the years. because I think it can kind of shed some light on what it means to have like a menu or what what your ideas are ahead of time. Yeah, really the biggest thing here with deciding what lunch is going to be is that you don't decide the moment you are making the lunches. Like you want to not be throwing a raw onion into your kids' lunch, because you have no other vegetable to throw into their lunchbox. I mean, they did that in holes, so it's it's possible to eat a raw onion. That's true. creating a menu is similar to creating a menu for your family the rest of the week. So you're gonna look at your lunch menu as being its own thing. And really taking the time to do this on the front end is gonna save you so much thinking, brain power be the week of the day before. So you can do a menu that is a different kind of rotating menu. You could either have a repeating weekly menu. So essentially you're thinking of if your kids go to school five days, then you're thinking of five different meals with the sides, all the things, and you're rotating that every single week. So you're basically eating the same thing every Monday, same thing every Tuesday, what every Wednesday, etc. Another idea is that you could have a lunch menu that is like a two-week rotating menu. So you build out two full weeks of meals, lunch meals. And then you're just rotating that every two weeks. So they're eating the same food essentially two times a month. And then the third idea is to have a monthly menu. So that would be a little bit more involved on the front end because you're planning out four weeks worth of meals. And you could repeat meals in there. It's not like you have to have four weeks of different meals. It could be you know, several of the same meals just planned out for a month, and then you're just repeating that monthly menu every single month. The the cool part about doing a monthly menu is that you essentially have a plan. For the whole school year, because if you do a monthly menu, you can just repeat that for the next nine months. You may want to change up a weekly menu or a bi-weekly menu because eventually your kids might get kind of sick of that. But I think there's a great compound effect that really comes from this because we have other episodes that y'all can go listen to on meal planning. And so this fits simply into the meal planning and it also simplifies your grocery shopping. Because now you just can look in the fridge and say, what am I running out of? Okay, I already know what I'm going to need. And you just go and get that at the end of the week. And boom, you're just ready to rock. You're not even creating like extra stress around going to the grocery store and figuring out what to get. It's already decided for you. another thing that we've done that I have always think has been fun for the kids are Things like lunchable days where it's just like, Hey, let's have every Wednesday is a lunchable. So they get to pick that one each week and it's something that they can look forward to. And then I mean it's super easy when you're shopping. Like who cares if it's ham and cheese this week versus the pizza one or whatever they have? But the point is it's still an easy decision already made. You get a lunchable on Wednesdays. What lunchable do you want? Yeah, it's like a category. So you could even do that with every day. Like Mondays could be like some type of sandwich. Tuesday could be some kind of wrap. Wednesday could be the lunchable idea. Thursday, you know, you could you get the point, but essentially giving a category to each day, and that's where you could be a little bit more flexible within that category. Now I want to introduce you to something that That I have found to be very helpful in my mothering over the last several years with all of these babies is having a lunchbox formula. And this is something that I break down in the free guide that you can download in our episode description. But it is a it's essentially like a formula is the best way to describe it. You're like plugging and chugging. And you have these different parts that you are essentially fulfilling every single time you build a lunchbox. And I want to make sure that when we feed our children that, you know, we're not perfect in this, but we want to give our kids wholesome, nutritious food. Well, I really appreciated that you came up with this idea because I'm definitely the kind of person who just opens the box and says, is there enough food in there? And is it not entirely all sugar? Okay, good. Let's move on with our day. And you are so much better at saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I think that the more convenient thing is to definitely get a lot of these like packaged items and just like throw a bunch of stuff in a lunchbox and call it good. But I do think that this is where some of my nutrition background is it really comes out because I start to think about just how can we make these lunchboxes balanced. And so when you have a formula that you decide that is important to you, and I'll share ours here in just a moment you just kind of stick to that formula and you teach your kids how to fill their lunchbox following your formula. Yeah, two things I'll say around that. One, I really appreciated it because like I said, it can help put lunches together. I felt like they were much healthier. And doing this takes away from the scramble. Like when you're scrambling, that's when you throw in all the carby packaged, I gotta run out the door things. So Moving our lunch preparation to anything other than the last second was so helpful to make sure we could take just a moment. And literally it's just a moment to follow the formula. And the other thing is I've really seen this work with our kids because, you know, we'll talk about later how we kind of bring our kids into this rhythm. And our kids do look in the lunch boxes and I can come down and say, Hey, how lunch is going? And they'll say, great. I have this done and this done and they actually have will walk me through this formula and say I am done because all these items are in here. Yeah. Fit every category. It almost like keeps our family on the same page of like, hey, you're not making special sandwiches. Okay. So here's what we expect for you to put in the lunchbox. Mm-hmm. And we want it to be balanced. We want you to have all these things that are gonna keep you full and nutritious and you know, all the things. But I don't wanna steal your thunder. So will you tell us what the formula is? Yeah. So here are the five things that essentially we're all looking for in lunch every single time we build them. by the way, if you are a homeschool parent. There is nothing to say that you can't build lunchboxes. If you don't want to think about lunch during lunchtime, you just want to have it done, you could build your lunchboxes just like a traditional student would the night before or in the morning. And they can go and you know put the ice packs in and everything. At lunchtime, you can simply pull out the lunchboxes and lunch is done. I think that would be such an easy rhythm for homeschool parents. Because Homeschooling, let's be real. I'm a homeschool mom and I've been a homescho school mom the last few years and I'm still homeschooling five kids this year in their hybrid school. And when you are homeschooling all day long, the last thing you want to do is put a bunch of lunches together. Like honestly, my my brain is so fried. Okay. Real life moment. We are recording this on Sunday. Tomorrow is a homeschool day because of our hybrid school situation. It sounds like this is something we should do tonight. We should. We should do our regular school lunch prep rhythm, even though everyone's home tomorrow. Why not? Let's do it. I mean, truly, because then it saves you one less thing to do during the middle of the day. I've never told you you're brilliant. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. Here's our here's our formula, because I know that you're just dying to hear it. Although it's nothing new. It's based off of the the healthy plates that the government, you know, the pyramid and the my plate that the government talks about. This is how I think of building the lunchbox. So I want my kids to have some sort of main item like a protein. And then I want them to have some sort of fruit and vegetable. I want them to have a crunchier, like some sort of carby type thing. And then dairy. And that's how we build their lunches. Most of the time their protein or their main thing is some sort of sandwich with a protein. So like egg salad, tuna salad, or some sort of like wrap or pinwheel. I put all these in the guide, by the way. along with links to recipes so that you can see some of these ideas that I'm about to share and you don't have to even figure it out. You can just click on the link. For fruit, a lot of times we do apple slices. We'll squeeze some lemon juice over the apple slices to so that they don't brown. Grapes are good, berries when they're in season, we do not do berries when they're not in season because they are crazy expensive. bananas, we do cuties. A lot a lot of times cuties are such a great lunchbox item because they're like in its own little cute wrapper. Yeah. And they just the kids love Applesauces too. we always try to do like a fruit and a vegetable. And so for vegetables, baby carrots are definitely a go to. Our kids love cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, snap peas. And then a good thing to throw in with the vegetables is having little pre-made containers that you just, you know, squeeze or make yourself of either hummus or ranch or veggie dip. And those you can easily prep on a Sunday night if you have a prep rhythm to do all this. But I mean, those are easy to prep the night before too. So Then the other categories is some sort of like crunchy or carby type item. And this is where we think about like our chips. Kids love pretzels and popcorn, trail mix. And then the last category that we try to hit, just because our kids love it, and we're from Wisconsin, so like how can you not? we always include dairy. And so that's gonna be like some sort of yogurt or yogurt parfait. or cottage cheese, cheese sticks, things like that. So Is there anything that I missed in those ideas that we do? No, and I truly I have seen as we'll talk about involving the kids here. this is great because once you get to the point where you have solidified this, it's not hard to teach your kids how to do this. I mean, like when did you get Azalea to start help with lunch? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think right when she went into kindergarten. I mean, our kids are in the kitchen with us really early on, which this is honestly one of the benefits to having your kids in the kitchen with you at a very early age because they will feel so ready to help make lunches when the time comes when they enter kindergarten. but yeah, I would say around kindergarten is when our kids start helping with lunches and then they get more independence and freedom as they go get into those later elementary years. And now we have our two girls. This is their job at night and in the morning. They're responsible to Prep everybody's lunch and get them finalized in the morning. So at night they are helping to pick through these things, but they actually think through each of these categories. Like they just move through this process and we don't have to keep teaching them anymore. Like they have got this down and it it helps them because they don't feel like it takes them as long either. Yeah. Because they know what to get. and then if they get stuck, it actually makes it really easy for them to come to us and they say, Hey, I'm looking for a fruit or I'm looking for a vegetable. And then if we're stuck in some way, we can problem solve that with them. Well, and just so you know, our girls' ages are seventh grade and fifth grade. And so just to put that in perspective for you, that they are working as a team to make all five of our school age kids lunches. And so our other school age kids are kindergarten, second grade and fourth grade. Those are our boys. while the girls are doing the lunches, the boys are actually cleaning up the kitchen from dinner. And so this is kind of happening simultaneously at night after we're done eating dinner. And if you're gonna give your kids the freedom to make their lunches, you can do it like one of two ways. You can set the menu for them so that they essentially look at the the plan and they say, Okay, Monday, mom wants us to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and she wants cucumbers in the lunch and she wants mandarin oranges, you know, and they see the things you want them to make that night and they just follow the plan. The other option is kind of doing what Christian was just saying where know what the formula is. They just then get to decide what are they putting into the formula. And so you could really give your kids kind of that freedom to be creative if you have options available to them. It does make it a little trickier with grocery shopping. I do think that having more of a menu based plan is better because then you can truly say, all right, we're buying strawberries this week for the fruit, we're buying, you know, ham and turkey for the meat and the protein. It does it makes it a little bit more focused. Yeah, I think you're right there. And we do have a little more focus like around, you know, limited choices. Yeah. But the beauty of it is, you know, those choices they have, so they feel empowered. And they feel like they're learning to make decisions for themselves and the menu's there so this doesn't take forever and there's no arguing and there's no fighting and there's no negotiating around certain things. It's like, nope, that's what we have. That's what it is this week. It's so true. Yeah, so you probably don't need more lunch ideas. I mean, honestly, you probably could give me lunch ideas because I feel like I'm always looking for new ideas. But I think the reality is is that we just need a short list of things that our family really loves in a rhythm so that we can take the stress out of making that lunch. And so my tip for you in this section is to sit down with your kids. Like if you don't currently have a plan around what to eat out like if your kids are always scrambling in the morning and throwing their lunches together or you are, I would say the next step is to sit down with your kids this week and really involve them into the conversation. Ask them like what are some of your favorite entrees or proteins or main things that we make for lunch or what are some of your favorite fruits or vegetables that I could have ready for you to throw into your lunchbox? gather a list of, you know, a few different ideas in each of those categories and then you can sit down, plan it out, make a menu that your family can then try to follow over the next week or two and see how that goes. I I've always found too with kids, especially thinking only a week, maybe two ahead, if they ever come to you and are like, I'm tired of blah blah blah, which we've probably all heard as parents. It's like, well, just so you know, this is what we have for this week. I just need you to finish this week. And then I'm excited to hear what you have to and we'll do something different for that next week. Totally. And usually they'll push through and get they get it and they will They will get through the week and they'll stop bugging you about it because you've given them the power to contribute to next week. So if they get tired of that same berry flavored yogurt stick, okay, great. Well, next week, let me help you either pick a different flavor or we can pick out like cheese cubes. What would you like? And then they contribute to that and they'll usually finish the week and you say th there's no more complaining. Yeah. 'Cause we're not a restaurant, right? Like we can give them some options, but we're not gonna drive to the store midweek just to get them something special because they're sick of what we're offering. I love that. I think we say that phrase a lot. Maybe more than other people because the number of people in this house, but it should be true no matter what. Can I ask you something? When was the last time you actually felt at peace? Not just productive, not just caught up, but settled. Because most of us aren't lacking desire for a slower, deeper life. We're just stuck in the busyness that keeps us rushing right past it. That's why we created the Slow and Saber Society. It's a snail mail club. Yes, it comes straight to your mailbox. It's a simple, tangible way to slow down each month. A piece of art, a cozy recipe, and a letter designed to help you reconnect with what actually matters. With God, with your family, and with your own soul. If your life has felt full but not meaningful, this is your invitation to begin again. You can learn more or join us at legacyrootsco.com/slash mailclub. And right now, if you use code podcast, you'll get 50% off your first month so you can try it out. Now back to the episode. So now that we talked about like what are we gonna eat, I think the next thing is to decide who is responsible for making lunch, which we've already kind of touched on, but we're just gonna hone in on it a little bit because this is part of making the lunch rhythm. is really making that decision. Are you as the parent going to make school lunch? Is the school going to provide the lunch, like hot lunch? Or you having the kids make the lunch or is there a combination? So let me paint a picture. We have had this happen in our home. We've had the rhythms conversation. Everybody's excited. We all buy in, but we didn't actually like assign this. And so we would get to the next morning and all look at each other like So where's the lunch? huh. And we're like, who's making lunch? No one. Everybody agreed on like what are we having and when is the work gonna happen and all this stuff, but no one was assigned to it. huh. And that's why it might sound silly to be focused on this right now, but make it crystal clear. Because if you don't, no one is going to do it. And not even like crystal clear on who's doing it, but When are they expected to make it? So if you are the one as the parent, you decided you're the one making the lunch, are you going to commit making it the night before school? Or are you gonna do it maybe Sunday night and you're making all the lunches for the week? Or are you gonna do it the morning of school? And the same goes for your kids. Like if you want your kids to be the one making the lunches. I think you're right. making it so crystal clear as to who's doing it and when are they expected to do it so that everyone is on the same page. And there's a lot of factors to this decision. For us, you know, our morning rhythm, as we've talked about, includes having a family sit-down breakfast. That requires us to get up a little bit earlier. And if we were gonna do the entire lunch rhythm in the morning, that would mean we'd have to get up even earlier on top of that. We know our kids, we know that getting them up at like six in the morning is not a recipe for success. And so all of that to say we have chosen to do at least half of our rhythm in the evening. That's what makes sense for our family. There's no perfect, hey, do it at this time and you'll be more successful. But what we are saying is look at your life, look at your morning rhythm, and can you reasonably fit that all in? If you can't, we've learned that actually doing, even if it's a small part in the evening, is actually really, really helpful. Yeah, that's true. But it really comes down to when is that person making the food. one idea is you do one weekly prep. So you do a certain day, maybe it's Sundays, where you are chopping up all the vegetables, you're washing the fruit, you're portioning out like the ranch and the hummus and maybe you're going to Subway and getting some foot long sandwiches. That was my prep. If you are lucky like Christian was, you're getting Subway. You could be preparing hard-boiled eggs. You could be making the homemade granola bars. I mean, there's so many things that you could prep during a weekly prep session. So that way the rest of the week flows much smoother. Actually, this is probably an area that I would like to do a little bit better ourselves because right now we're doing a lot of prep the night before. But I could see how maybe doing like an hour to prep on a Sunday with some of this, or even our girls doing more of a prep. with the sides especially could help the week flow a little bit easier. Yeah. Bagging up chips, bagging up desserts, anything like that. You're right. and then the night before prep. So this is another idea is if you're not gonna take one day during the week to prep a bunch of stuff, then you can just simply prep things the night before, which we talked about already. Like our girls are doing this for all five school age kids. but then the other option, if you're like we don't have time the night before because of sports, then the only other option is to prep food the day of. And so that could look like if your kids go to school, then you're prepping their lunchbox the morning of. If you are homeschool family, then perhaps you're prepping just at lunchtime and you're just following the menu that you've created. But I think the biggest thing is just deciding what are you prepping and when are you prepping that food? I think that brings us to our our final part in planning the lunch rhythm is organizing your environment so that the rhythm can flow really smoothly. And we would say that's this for any rhythm that you want to organize your home space or your life in a way that the rhythm can work well. But specifically for the lunch box rhythm or the lunch rhythm, you want to be able to organize your kitchen and your cupboards and your freezer and your fridge and you want to get the things that you need and have them organized in a way that they're easy to access, easy to see. easy for the kids, like accessible to the kids if they're packing the lunch boxes, and really just creating a space for each of the different items. So for example, lunchboxes are kind of a critical supply in this system. And so you want to have a home for the lunch boxes. I don't know if you're like me, but I don't like clutter on the counters. That bothers me so much. So if the kids come home and just throw their lunchboxes on the island, that to me is too much clutter. So we have created a home that the lunchboxes go overnight or you know until we prep them again Because that is very frustrating when you come home and you're like, Why is this stuff everywhere? And how come there's just garbage in every single one I open right now? Yeah. So we But you have thrown this away at school. Totally. For some reason they always bring it home. Well their job is they have to come home. They have to put the ice pack back in the freezer because how many times do the kids leave their lunch boxes in their backpacks and then now we have no more ice packs the next day for lunches. So we have trained them for the most part to put the ice packs away, throw away their garbage, and then put their lunchbox in the cupboard, which is our home for all the lunchboxes. Can you give us some examples of how you've organized our fridge or what the pantry, for instance, might look like and how you've made it more efficient? Yeah. So we have one whole like large cupboard space dedicated for snacks, and we've organized it So that way the snacks are all by type and kids can easily go into that one cupboard, find a snack to put in their backpack. we also have organized the fridge in a way that we have a shelf that's literally all of our dairy stuff, or we put like the yogurt tubes, we put the certain types of hummus or fruit or whatever they're looking for in certain areas. So I think the the key here is just Organizing your fridge, organizing your cupboard in a way that if you want your kids to pack their lunches, they know where to find those things. like you've really done a great job of this dedicated spot on a shelf that you've placed the quick things and you've really helped simplify it for them. One idea I've seen that we never implemented, but I thought was a great idea. was a mom came up with a system kind of like we have the formula, but she came up with a formula that basically you're you have to have numbers like one through four or one through five in your lunchbox. Okay. And she made these containers in her fridge that were labeled the numbers. And then the kids when they're packing their lunch, they have to take one of each of the numbers. That's really smart. Yeah. You have to have the space to do to do something like that. And then it also if you're bringing things like sandwiches or like entrees that can't be prepped too far in advance. It doesn't really work. But if you're doing a lot of packaged items, I could see that working. or if you're willing to package items, I could see it being a good thing. That's pretty cool. I can even see with sides. You could have containers in your fridge that are like here is all the fruit ready to go. Here are all the dairy items ready to go. And you need to take one of each of the things. That's a really great idea. Yeah. However, it would require that in my Midwest drink fridge that I would have to create space. You literally are all about that joke. This is such a dad joke that I feel like this on repeat in our house. The Midwest drink fridge. Except you know what's funny? You know, most of the people that that are listening can relate to this because either you live in the Midwest or you know people in the Midwest and you know what we mean when we say the Midwest drink fridge out in the garage. And if you have one of those, it makes this type of organization a lot better. It does. It was a lifesaver. Because truly, I don't think it if you didn't have a second fridge, it would make it kind of hard to organize a bunch of things ahead of time in your fridge. Because you can't as a big family, you can't really function without that kind of space. Yeah. I agree. So go Midwest drink fridge. That's right. It must like yellow is a bonus. And it has to be in the basement or the garage. Correct. It cannot be anywhere on the main level of your living. No, no, no. It cannot be so convenient. It can't be one of those fancy like wine fridges either. It has to be like kind of janky. no, no. This is not bougie whatsoever. So I think to your point though, getting organized is important. I think having the right space is important. So if you in your dreams desire to have all these, you know, beautiful labeled organized bins and things in your fridge and your cupboards to like, you know, house all the the stuff for your lunchboxes, then you just have to have the right space for it. And If you don't, then you just have to get real with yourself. Like maybe we're not prepping on Sunday a bunch of stuff. Maybe we're just prepping the night before. And that's okay too. We've done that for many, many years and it works. You just have to have the rhythm. Good rhythms don't just tell us what to do, but they make the right thing easier to do. And so today we just wanted you to give yourself that permission to just keep it. Simple. Like we're not sharing all these ideas with you because we're like, you have to go out and buy a new fridge and you know, have this fancy labeled organized system and have all these steps that you have to follow every single week. Like we want you to find a rhythm, also known as a system, to to make lunches easier for you and your family each week. Not because we're obsessed with lunches. Okay, this is not the most exciting episode, and we get that. Our kids would say they're obsessed with lunch, to be clear. That's true. It is their favorite subject. I have already been asked about what is for lunch tomorrow. And it is three PM. So I think that the simpler you keep your rhythms, the more they will get done. If you try to overcomplicate this and add all the fancy bells and whistles to the rhythm, you're gonna get really excited about it and maybe do it for a couple days, but then you're gonna go back to the way you used to do it, which is maybe no rhythm at all and just kind of living like moment to moment in stressed. We don't wanna continue to live frustrated. And we're not creating a lunch rhythm because we're trying to become the family who makes the homemade granola bars and Perfectly portioned veggies every Sunday. No, no, no. No, this is all because we want to remove some of this unnecessary decision making from our week. So we can have more capacity for the people that we love and are actually doing all of this for. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that's the key about rhythms in general, is having a rhythm creates more time freedom. It simplifies your life so that you have more capacity for the people you love and for the things you love to do. Most of us don't love making lunch, but I love having a rhythm around lunch because it does free me up to have more brain power, more energy for the other things I love to do. Yeah, I was thinking about this today. Like it's so simple, but our son walked in today. And was like, Dad, will you play Mario Kart with me today? That's not a question I get all the time. And so I want to be able to say yes to that moment. And having our rhythms in place allows me to be able to say yes. And I can, I don't just keep putting them off like, well, maybe later, or I would love to do that, or maybe later. I can say yes, and here's when we can do it, because I know. When every other rhythm is happening throughout the day. Uh-huh. And I know exactly that everything is gonna get taken care of, that it needs to get taken care of. And so now I have the white space, and here's when that white space is gonna be. And I could say yes to that little boy's desire to spend a few minutes together. Yeah, that's such a good point. And that was our our hope in this series, this back to school series is to give parents. That extra little white space, that extra margin, so that they can have time for their kids, for them to not be just stressed out every single moment of the day as we head into the school year. Because it is true, like the the fall is about to get busy for most of us, unless we're super intentional to not let it get busy. And so if there's anything that we can do. to slow the pace to keep margin for our family to rest together. Like we're all about that. And that's why we're so hardcore about rhythms. And so go back and listen to those other few weeks, because they will really set you up for success and get you set up for a more peaceful, slower fall. And the beauty is we've been doing these things now for several years. And so our hope is that we're just passing these things on to you because now as we enter our fifth kid in school in kindergarten, I can tell you this all feels so much more on autopilot and it feels so much easier than it used to. Totally. And these are rhythms that we wouldn't give up or change for anything. We just tweak now. Yeah. And so that's our hope for you is that you can implement these get started this week and stick with it so that you reap a reward down the road. So we have a very simple challenge for you this week. We want you to sit down as a family or with your kids for about 20 minutes and we want you to ask these questions. You can ask them to yourself even But here are a few questions for you. So what are your lunches going to be? So choose some sort of rotation, a weekly or a two-week or monthly menu. The second thing is what is your lunchbox formula? So we gave you our formula, and again, you can download our school lunch guide in the description, but you could come up with your own formula. if your family doesn't eat dairy or you don't eat gluten or you prefer a different category that we didn't list, make your own formula and then stick with it. And then the third one is Who is going to make the lunch? So decide who is going to make it and then clarify that with your family. And then four is when and where does it happen? Meaning when are you making the lunch and where are you making the lunch? So are you making it the night before, the morning of? Are you making it during your homeschool or before your homeschool starts? Those are some of the important questions that you need to do to get this rhythm up and running. And like Christian just said, eventually this rhythm is gonna feel like autopilot. right now, it might feel like whoa, that's a lot of moving pieces that I have to think through. And I don't know if I even have the energy to think through all those moving pieces. But I promise you, if you take just 20 minutes to plan this rhythm out, take another 30 minutes to make a menu and then give it a go this next week, I can probably Promise you that you are going to already have less stress. I can promise you you're gonna get that time back. It's going to reap a huge reward. And remember, Kayla's shared already, we have the guide for you. Don't forget to download that. We've already taken so much off your plate with all those questions plus ideas in there. I have 20 lunch ideas in that guide for you, along with sides. Like if you don't want to take the time. To plan a two-week menu, I have a full blown two week lunch menu along with links. Wow. You don't even need to take the time to plan the menu. Done. Implement my menu. And I would say that it's pretty balanced. So that guide is just a gift for you to help you and your family have a more peaceful school year. Well, thank you for joining us this week. Go get that guide. Go get after this rhythm. Go find some peace in your family. Let us know how it's going in the comments. If you have any questions or follow-up, we'd love to hear it. It fuels us forward. And thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a five star review. It helps others who are looking to grow their family roots to find us. and learn these valuable lessons and resources that we have learned the hard way and we are just passing on to you. So thank you for joining us on the Rooted Family Podcast. We look forward to seeing you next week. Bye now.