Jenni's Kitchen

My goal in feeding the kids is to get some protein, veggies, and fruit and some healthy fat. We’ve got carrots, and cucumbers, some lunch meat, and a half of a banana. Some kids will require more food than this but I’ve found that this is enough (especially if I added some cheese or cream cheese or yogurt to the mix), as long as they’ve had a good amount of protein for breakfast, with a good amount of healthy fats (coconut oil, bacon, sausage, eggs). My kids (ages 9-2) will eat this or just a little more than this for lunch, no snacking between lunch and dinner so that they EAT their dinner. :)

And dinner is a whole other story, right now we are just talking about lunches. Sometimes, like at the end of the month, I’m just scraping things together to try to find enough to feed the kids that don’t include grains. Other times I let the kids go “shopping” in the fridges (we have one on our back porch too), to help us decide what veggies they want on their plates today. We usually feed everyone the same thing, but sometimes I give them a few choices it just depends on what we have, how much time we have and what mood mommy is in. :)

After the new year we decided to take the dive and start to really make strides to helping our children eat more healthy meals. I’m not afraid of my kids getting fat, but I know that they eat too many grains. So around the first of January we ditched the bread and tortillas and it’s been a pretty smooth transition, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at their adaptation to less bread and more meat and veggies. We don’t seem to have issues with dairy so our children still eat dairy and we do some white rice and a few gluten free substitutes here and there to give them a little treat.

Lunches are the hardest for me, so I thought I would take some pictures and share here some of the examples of our “Healthy Kid Lunches” with all of you. Some of them go over really well, some of them not so well. Hope this inspires some of you wanting to make some changes in your kid’s diet. And we’ve noticed positive changes in some of our children’s behaviors which is really encouraging! Here is lunch #1

Baby Carrots, Summer sausage, sweet peas with dill dip, slice of cheddar and a slice of gluten free flax seed bread from Costco (which the kids LOVE by the way!)