Continuing with my plan to tell you about something that has been a great help since home educating, this week I want to write about Goodbyn Lunchboxes.
Now it may seem a strange thing that when we finally decided to home educate one of the first things I went searching for was lunch boxes! Lunch boxes tend to be thought of as something you need for taking to school or work. The thing is that I knew right off the bat we would be doing a lot of travelling and visiting. My children are both hands-on type people and the best learning experiences for them are when they can actually touch and see what we're learning about. I knew that every week we would do at least one visit to a museum or place of interest, plus the home ed groups, trips to the woods or the beach etc. Our money is limited and taking your own lunch is always the cheaper option so an easy to use, portable lunch box each was the best bet.
I do a lot of research before I buy anything, checking prices, value and also previous customer reviews. All of that led me to Goodbyn. I liked that their lunch boxes came all-in-one and despite being plastic were at least free of BPAs and Phthalates. There are not lots of fiddly little containers to contend with or lose, they are easy to use and clean and they look fun with stickers so we could personalise them. I ordered ones with ears in blue and pink for the children and a smaller sized "Bynto" for me.
Each comes with it's own water bottle with a slot to store it in; if you fill and then freeze the bottle it also acts as an ice pack to keep everything cool! The different sized slots mean I can pack all sorts of different things without them getting mixed up. It also means the children can choose a wide variety of foods to eat as and when they like. Kind of like a portable monkey platter! This is one of Papaya's lunches she took a photo of...
Now it may seem a strange thing that when we finally decided to home educate one of the first things I went searching for was lunch boxes! Lunch boxes tend to be thought of as something you need for taking to school or work. The thing is that I knew right off the bat we would be doing a lot of travelling and visiting. My children are both hands-on type people and the best learning experiences for them are when they can actually touch and see what we're learning about. I knew that every week we would do at least one visit to a museum or place of interest, plus the home ed groups, trips to the woods or the beach etc. Our money is limited and taking your own lunch is always the cheaper option so an easy to use, portable lunch box each was the best bet.
I do a lot of research before I buy anything, checking prices, value and also previous customer reviews. All of that led me to Goodbyn. I liked that their lunch boxes came all-in-one and despite being plastic were at least free of BPAs and Phthalates. There are not lots of fiddly little containers to contend with or lose, they are easy to use and clean and they look fun with stickers so we could personalise them. I ordered ones with ears in blue and pink for the children and a smaller sized "Bynto" for me.
Each comes with it's own water bottle with a slot to store it in; if you fill and then freeze the bottle it also acts as an ice pack to keep everything cool! The different sized slots mean I can pack all sorts of different things without them getting mixed up. It also means the children can choose a wide variety of foods to eat as and when they like. Kind of like a portable monkey platter! This is one of Papaya's lunches she took a photo of...
As you can see she has fruit salad, chocolate biscuits, llama crackers, ham and salad sandwich and dried fruit. The "sandwich slot" could just as easily have pasta in it though and the clever lid means there is no fear of the fruit salad juices and the pasta juices getting all mixed up. Everything stays separate I have even put hummus or yoghurt in the slots before without it travelling where it shouldn't. As you don't need to wrap everything separately I find it much easier to pack healthy lunches rather than just crisps and chocolate bars. The boxes even come with a leaflet giving suggestions on what to pack.
You can see the lunches I packed for a day out in the first photo above and here is another lunch, this time my son's that he decided to helpfully do a video guide to on a snowy drive to a home ed group!
The best part? After use you just tip away any leftovers ("what are they?" my children ask!) and the whole thing can be put in the dishwasher!
I ordered our boxes direct from the Goodbyn website. They arrived quickly and were surprisingly good value.
Since ordering them, Goodbyn have actually introduced an additional new system to their range called Mix and Match involving lots of smaller boxes. I'm not sure about that; as I said before the advantage to me of the boxes was that it did come all in one piece without lots of fiddly bits to lose. I just hope it doesn't mean they stop the larger size box completely. The box isn't too big to carry around, yet holds a lot of food, if I pack carefully I can even put in enough food for my children for a whole day! I would be prepared to give the new system a try though if they fancied sending it to me ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment