I think at some point, I probably linked to http://veganlunchbox.blogspot.com, but honestly, I don’t remember. The links that your other posters put up are so much fun, I don’t think you need me! I LOVE the flickr pictures of the artistic lunchboxes.
Julian (Monkey’s age – 3.5) is also picky and sort of a non-eater. Except for Life cereal. He could eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. We have gone as far as telling him he was having something new for dinner called “pollo” which he refused to try and then at the end of dinner as we were playing some ridiculous bargaining game (which admittedly only heightens the tension around food) to get him to eat it, he looked at us and asked in a terribly sad voice, “Is it chicken?” (Damn bilingual preschool.) “I don’t like chicken!” he reminded us. Duh.
Anyway, my point to share is that although I love the adorable presentation of food as shapes and animals, I feel especially frustrated if I take the time to do that (using small cookie cutters) and he won’t eat it, so I think it’s not a great strategy. It has worked a few times, but more often backfired.
Rather than tell you that we should relax or whatever, I’ll just be honest that it is comforting to read that someone else’s kid won’t eat. I don’t know if a bento box can change their behavior. Keep me posted if Lil’ Monkey goes for it.

Come to think of it, that’s how I was! She’s not biologically mine, but go figure. She has so many of my mannerisms, it’s unreal. Damn.

Great site. I’ve meant to visit sooner, but just haven’t gotten around to it. Now I’m all registered and ready to go. And just think, I merely MODERATE my comments. BAH!

She’s like a hobbit. Breakfast, then second breakfast. On weekends the parent lucky enough to sleep in gets to sleep in AT LEAST until after Sassa’s had second breakfast.

For breakfast at home, he’ll happily eat 2 or 3 cartons of yogurt, a piece of fruit (or 2, or 3), and peanut butter on whole wheat toast.

Then we take him to day care, where they say, “Do you you want breakfast?” and he runs joyfully to the dining area to devour whatever they’re serving.

At least on the weekends, lunch is fairly light, and dinner not much more substantial than lunch.

as for eating… Sassa is also very inconsistent with what she’ll eat. One night we took her for Indian food and she ate an entire adult’s entree. We don’t know where all the food went. The next time we went there, she drank tamarind chutney and that was it, ate nothing else that night. We just mentally tossed our hands in the air and passed the dhal around.

We’re also really happy that Sassa still listens to her internal fullness sensor. Some days she barely eats anything, other days she’s a bottomless pit. We figure her body knows better than us what amount of food it needs in a day.

I am now just about practically almost completely reassured that we won’t find, in some doctor’s exam when she’s 17 years old and just about on her own, that she has been suffering all her young life from some critical undernourishment that will have been behind her depressed college entrance exam scores and her overall sense of hope and well-being. I am totally slipping fish oil into her milk tonight when we do Books n’ Milk.