As a founder of a Colorado charter school, I know how frustrated parents are with the lack of healthy choices for school lunch. That’s why I’ve tried to come up with healthy school lunch recipes on my blog.

Parents want healthier choices – less fat, sugar and salt and more organic and locally grown produce – for their child’s hot lunch. It’s a chore to pack a nutritious lunch every day. They also know that healthy kids who eat nutritious meals at school do better academically and socially.

The Child Nutrition Act – a major piece of federal legislation that helps determine school food policy and resources – will go before Congress in 2009. This offers the opportunity to create a future for school food in which fresh, healthy meals are the norm and all children have access to the type of comprehensive nutrition education that creates healthy habits for a lifetime.

Want to change the future of school food and make fresh, healthy meals the norm? Sign the petition from Healthy Schools Campaign.

Horizon Organic sent me samples of their single serve milk, which is available in reduced fat plain, chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. Immediately got the cooperation of two test subjects – my children. Nathan tried the plain and the vanilla for two school lunches. And Lucie got the chocolate and strawberry.

Our review

Both children LOVED the flavored milks. And enjoyed the expandable straws that come with the milk even more. (Both children kept the straws and insisted that I wash and save them.)

They’ve had Horizon flavored Single Serve Milks before at Starbucks and have always enjoyed drinking them. However, Nathan did not like the plain reduced fat. He thought it tasted weird. I’m not surprised after having a flavored drink. Plus, ultra-pasteurized milk does taste odd when you’re used to fresh milk.

Is the expense worth it?

If I was to buy the milks for my children, I’d stick with the flavors. However, while I love the idea that Horizon Organic Single Serve Milks are safe to drink at room temperature, they’re very expensive. This week they were on sale at my local grocery for $1. They’re usually $1.25. That’s a lot of money for the convenience of organic milk.

But what are your options? Either you buy the 25 cents milk at school that isn’t organic, send them in with a thermos of milk from the organic milk that you have at home, or better yet, let them drink water during lunch. After all, water doesn’t sour, it’s free, and is probably the healthiest option of all.

Still, if you want your kids to drink organic milk when they take their lunch to school, Horizon Organic Single Serve Milks are a practical – and delicious – option.

For more of my reviews of Horizon Organic products, go to:

• Horizon DHA Omega-3 milk: a review

For links to delicious recipes using Horizon Organic products, check out:

• The “Smart People Drink Milk” Contest
• The “Milk is Brain Food Contest”
• What Eddie can do with some Jack-O-Lantern Smoothies

I’m attending a special mommy blogger event next week in Southern California put on by the kind folks at Sony. We’ll be trying out Sony Digital imaging products and services including trying out the Sony Cybershot DSCW170, Sony Alpha DSLRA350 Digital SLR Camera, and the Sony HDR-SR11 10MP 60GB High Definition Hard Drive Handycam Camcorder with 12x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom. Fancy! We’ll also be meeting with photography expert Me Ra Koh, and from shooting pictures on the beaches of La Jolla.

I’m excited but nervous. It’s been years since I took a photography course. Let’s just say it was before digital cameras were invented and I spent more time in the darkroom printing pictures than I did taking them. My experience with digital cameras is limited. Like most folks, I just point, shoot, download, crop and post/email. So I’m glad that I have a copy of Photographing Your Family: And All the Kids and Friends and Animals Who Wander Through Too to read on the plane thanks to the folks at National Geographic.

What I liked about Photographing Your Family is that Joel Sartore, a National Geographic magazine photographer and father of three, reviews the basics like composition, key elements and light. Then he shares his secrets for photographing your family by going through his own family albums and explaining what he did to get the shot. You will also learn the best ways to print, display, and store your work, and tips on choosing equipment. I was especially interested in the chapter on the digital darkroom where he explains how to use software programs like Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 to alter and improve your photographs.

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As a child, did you like to dig up rocks in the backyard? Then you can relate to Julie the Rockhound by Gail Langer Karwoski and illustrated by Lisa Downey. When Julie moves to a new house and finds a piece of quartz crystal buried in the backyard, she turns into “Julie the Rockhound.” Soon her dad dad shows her how to dig for rocks and explains how crystals are formed.

Like other Syvlan Dell Publishing books, Julie the Rockhound comes with a “For Creative Minds” section. (Click here for a PDF version.) Your child will explore if items are plants, animals or minerals. They’ll learn what they need to become a rockhound, how rocks are formed, and how to classify minerals.

The “Food Rocks!” section shows how you can use cooking to understand how rocks are formed. The recipe they give for sedimentary rocks is making a sandwich. The layers of margarine, cheese, bread and meat represent layers of sedimentary rock. Great idea! But why just make a regular sandwich, when you can make a Quadruple-Decker Honolulu Hightower courtesy of the Denver Post and Tucker Shaw.

Quadruple-Decker Honolulu Hightower
Photo by Glenn Asakaw of the Denver Post

If macadamia butter and papaya jam is too weird for your child, try good old peanut butter and grape jelly along with the bananas, and substitute granola for the shredded coconut. You could also experiment with low-fat cream cheese, strawberry preserves, sliced strawberries, and crunchy cereal. A savory idea would be hummus, grated carrots and pepper strips and some baked potato chips for the crunch. Or try cashew butter, apple butter and thin apple slices along with granola, cereal or shredded rice cakes.

Your child could help cut out the bread (try wheat too), spreading the nut butters and jams, and stacking the layers.

Ingredients

1. Five slices white bread, cut into rounds with a cookie cutter (Make sure your slices will fit into a round plastic container as shown here. This sandwich is way too high for plastic wrap or a baggie.)
2. Macadamia butter
3. Papaya jam
4. Pineapple jam
5. A few slices dried banana
6. A few flakes dried coconut (unsweetened)

Directions

1. Spread two rounds bread with macadamia butter. Spread one round with papaya jam. Spread one round with pineapple preserves. Layer banana slices and dried coconut on final round.
2. Stack rounds, starting and finishing with macadamia-butter rounds. Put into container.

Lucie begins her first day of pre-K this afternoon, and is so excited to start! A wonderful book from Random House that captures this feeling is Kindergarten Countdown by Anna Jane Hays and illustrated by Lind Davick.

A little girl named Lucy counts off the days by naming what she’ll do in kindergarten, what she’ll wear, and what she’ll learn. The countdown is a great way to prepare kids for that exciting first day of school (if you have a preschooler or in my case a pre-K’er, then substitute the right grade when you’re reading it out loud).

Not only was I thrilled that the main character had the same name (though spelled differently) as my daughter, the book captured the excitement and all the things she had to look forward to – making friends, playing games, practicing writing, using your manners, and so on.

Activities
This would be a really fun book to use as a countdown to the days leading up to school. You could read Kindergarten Countdown and combine it with a calendar. Assign an activity like “buy school supplies” or “pick out school clothes” to the days before school starts. You could also make time to come up with snack and lunch box menus. Each time you do a countdown to school activity, you could discuss all the exciting things they will be doing, and answer any questions your son or daughter may have.

If your child is apprehensive about his or her first day, having a Kindergarten Countdown activity would be a good way to help them through their fears. You may even want to combine the calendar with a “dry run” by getting up early, getting dressed, getting their backpack ready, and pretending to wait for the school bus, or walking or driving to school. Many schools have open houses before the first official day, and that’s a great opportunity for your child to walk around the school, meet the teachers, and find out where the bathrooms are.

More Bento School Lunch Ideas
Are you tired of bento box lunches yet? I hope not because they’re so fun to look at even if you’d never take time to make them. Check out Laptop Lunches, a website featuring American-style bento boxes designed to help book, The Laptop Lunch User’s Guide: Fresh Ideas for Making Wholesome, Earth-friendly Lunches Your Kids Will Love. (A good pairing with this book is Ann Cooper’s Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children.)

Another site to check out is the Lunch in a Box blog. Blogger “Biggie” makes bento boxes for her preschooler, “Bug.” Read her Need for speed: A mommy’s lunch manifesto. I’m very inspired by this wonderful blog, though I’m not sure how much bento box creativity I can get out of PB&J and pudding – the only two things my son Nathan wants to eat for lunch these days.

(And thanks to The Common Room: Recipe Carnival – LUNCH for the bento links and other great lunch ideas.)