My Pinterest-worthy moment

Notice that the title says 'moment', singular.

Since we are currently visiting Japan, I thought it would be fun to do some Bento box-style food art for one of our lunches. I've always been just a little obsessed with this, so I finally had an excuse to buy a couple more food-art-things. (I'm not even sure what to call them.) So for lunch today I made this.

It only took an hour, and wasn't actually enough food to feed everyone. But it looked good, and the children were enchanted, which was my goal. Here are some close ups.

The rice pandas are my favorite. I had leftover rice, and the face, hands, feet, and ears are cut out of seaweed sheets. They were... fussy.

I already had the hard-boiled egg molds, so I made use of those as well. This is a bunny, if you can't tell.

Then there were the Nutella (well, the Aldi version of it at least) panda sandwiches. These were almost as fussy as the seaweed.

There are also little orange flowers cut out of carrot disks, spinach stems, lettuce, and half moons of honey melon. It helped to stop at H-Mart on the way home from TM's appointment. It's where I got the melons...

and the seaweed.

My guess is that this box will last less than a week. Some of my people really, really, really like seaweed.

Everyone loved it. I was told many times that we should have this lunch a lot. I'm going to choose to interpret 'a lot' as meaning once or twice or year. I have too many children to go in full time for competitive lunch making.

In full disclosure, this is the modified version to what I had in my head. I really thought what would be fun would be to get everyone their own cute bento box, and wake up early in the morning to secretly fill each of them. Then when lunch time came, I could whisk them out, and surprise them all. This did not happen. The boxes, while not being terribly expensive, were more than I was willing to spend. I am not a morning person. No matter how much I think my children would enjoy the surprise, it was not motivating enough to get me out of bed in time to make as many individual lunches as I would have needed. In the end, everyone watched and helped a bit make the lunches. I think they enjoyed this as much as a surprise in the end. Having watched me make them, I think I will also see individual children using some of our new tools to make their own lunch.