A week of lunches with Applegate {Day1 Ham & Cheese Hitchhikers}

The day of reckoning is upon us,

the first day of school, bring on the flood of kids wearing backpacks in front of doors on FB.

Its been a CRAZY fast summer.

Blinked, gone.

But looking back we did squeeze a lot in.

So in the scheme of summers, I would call it a success.

But with the first day of school comes the grind of busting out lunches.

Which honestly can become an overwhelming process to make sure I am providing a variety of healthy options that aren't too time consuming.  

So I am UBER excited to team up with Applegate this week to share some lunch ideas.

If you are not familiar with Applegate and their products, its pretty simple for me, they provide a product that I can read the ingredients and know what I am about to feed my family.  But get this, it taste good too!

For Hitchhikers I took some organic black forrest ham and organic white american and rolled them up, usually just two rolls.  Then stick three pretzels in the roll and cut it make little ham and cheese bites.

I paired them with apple slices with almond butter and a hard boiled egg.
And how exciting are these Adam & Eve waters?
Water based with real juice and coconut water.

I purchased those cute little silicone dividers from Bento A Day.  They are a great little way to pick foods from mixing.

And you cannot pack up lunches the first week without a little note of love.

I reached out to Kori from Paper & Pigtails to hook us up with some super fun free notes

 {click here for download of boy and/or girl versions}.

After a quick mention to her about how fun it would be to have little convo starters at the bottom, she came through. Perfect little card to add a note, and let you kids ask their new and old friends some questions to find out more about them.

See you back tomorrow...

Organic Black Forrest Ham and Organic American Cheese Provided By Applegate

DIY Fall Hanging Art

So, its officially Fall.

And the only reason I know this to be true is Starbucks released PSL 

{for those not in the know thats a Pumpkin Spice Latte}.

And since I base all change of seasons off Starbucks drink rotations, I decided some fall decorations were in order.

WAAAAY back in the blogging day, Eighteen 25 Girls had blogged this really fun technique for painting with corn syrup.

I had always wanted to try it, so I thought this was a perfect time.

I teamed up with my buddy Kori from Paper & Pigtails to help come up with some

cute fall images to use for this project, they can be downloaded here 

{Feel free to use these for other fall projects, just remember they are for personal use only}

So what you will need:

- Corn syrup

- food coloring

- freezer paper

- printed sheet of images

- black crayon

- paint brushes

- small bowls at least 5

- tape

- scissors

- fishing line or something similar

- a branch

First thing will be to lay your printed images under some freezer paper {shiny wax side down} and tape it in place.  Then with a black crayon trace them out.

Once you have traced as many images as you want, take a tbsp of corn syrup and mix in a few drops of food coloring, I made orange, red, yellow, green, and brown. And start painting.  You want it to be a little thick in the application.  And the cool thing with the crayon is if you get some corn syrup on it, the wax propels it and it will disappears off it.

                            

These will take at least 24 hrs to dry.  

Once they are dry cut them out. Then I took a tiny hole punch to each one and strung up a branch above our table {I have a little hook up there all the time for hanging things} And then started hanging the pieces.  The owls I decided to add to the branch as though they are perched...

I love how it turned out!  

Another option would to be make a garland to hang around the windows to still get the stained glass affect they give.

ENJOY!