Once again I’m joining Aurie, Lisa, Amy, and Connie to share ideas for fun, family activities for the summer. We hope you’ll stop by every Wednesday to share in our theme or link up your own posts about great summertime fun for the whole family!

Last week I talked about how we’re using reciprocal membership agreements to stretch our summer fun budget. This week we’re talking Food fun, and who doesn’t love food?

But with the kiddos off at Mimi’s house for the week, my mind has been busy with back-to-school thoughts more than summer thoughts. And that means packing lunches! (Or making them, if you’re homeschoolers!)

Here’s some super fun lunch ideas!

Have you heard of muffin tin meals? So cool! Michelle from Muffin Tin Mom runs a weekly blog hop to share ideas for muffin tin meals. The idea is that the portions are perfect for little folks, the foods are finger-fun, and there’s endless possibilities to make new foods (or healthy, whole foods) more appealing. And I know from personal experience that you can pick up muffin tins in just about any size, shape, or color from your local thrift store for under $1. (I use them for organizing my craft desktop, so I have several.)

This is an adaption of the overall idea of bento box lunches. You can google this one for thousands of ideas, but I stumbled across it early in my blogging through Kelly at Easy Lunchboxes. We don’t use Easy Lunchboxes right now because they don’t fit in our kids current lunchbox systems, but Kelly has tons of resources and links for great healthy, funlunch ideas.

Scrolling through, I even found several blogs that focus specifically on bento creations for special diets and conscientious parents. Keeley McGuire has a peanut allergy in her family. Cristi at BentOnBetterLunches creates nutritious and trash-free lunches. And Lise over at Veggie-Bento developes, you guessed it, vegetarian bento box lunches for her little girl.

And, of course, Keeley’s picture also brings up my favorite lunch treat–lunchbox love notes!  Yep, while the kids are away I’ve started scraping up some lunchbox love notes for the school year that’s just around the corner. This year I’m trying a different design–no fold–like the one in the picture above.

The backs are still perfect for a handwritten note. I’m still playing around with the size and shape, but the good thing about this simple craft is there’s no right or wrong answer. Any design will work–it’s about the note, not the notepaper!

And speaking of family food–I’ve got a meal planning giveaway coming up tomorrow, so I hope you’ll stop back by! Anyone that links up a food related post this week will be automatically entered!

What summer fun have you been up to lately? Link up a new or old post about your great summer family activities. Please keep it family friendly and link to you post, not your homepage.

Next week our summer fun theme will be Summer Learning and I’ll be posting about our recent nature discoveries like the Luna moth!