• Choosing the Healthiest Foods for Your Family

    Welcome! I am a mom of a busy 8 year old and an adventurous 6 year old. I also happen to work for a great company called NuVal. NuVal is a nutritional scoring system that rates foods on a scale of 1-100, based on how nutritious they are. We are implementing NuVal in grocery stores around the country.

    NuVal may not be in your area yet. But I see the scores while they are "hot off the press" and because of that I am able to make better decisions about what to feed my family.

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    I am not a registered dietitian. I am just a mom who happens to work for NuVal. I am also an AFAA-certified Group Exercise Instructor. NuVal is a system designed to lead customers to the most nutritious food choices. It is not a diet or weight-loss plan. Before starting a diet, you should always consult your personal physician. The opinions expressed in this blog are the opinions of the writer and not the opinions of NuVal LLC.

Two of My Favorite Things: Horizon Organic Milk and Lunchbox Notes

Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 06:45 AM

Welcome to Two of My Favorite Things – one of my favorite features here on A Better Bag of Groceries – where I tell you about two things that I love. 

I can tell you one of my least favorite things.  That would be making lunches.  I think that by the end of the day, I’m just all fooded out.  I’ve just had enough of touching, thinking and writing about food.  So truth be told, my husband does a lot of lunch-making in our house. 

So this post realy should be called Two of Our Favorite Things.

First, Horizon Organic Milks.

I love these milk boxes because they do not leak.  Back when my kids first started drinking milk (around age 1), I would send them to daycare with re-useable Rubbermaid sippy containers full of milk in their lunchboxes.  And I would come home with stinky lunchboxes.  And then I would try to wash the stinky lunchboxes (which didn’t work out all that well).  Finally, I would buy new lunchboxes.  And then I would repeat the process.  I always said that I wish that someone would put milk in a juice-box-like container.  Thankfully, Horizon Organic did.  UHT, by the way, stands for Ultra High Temperature processing. That is what makes the milk shelf-stable.  Cool, huh?  I like knowing that even if the ice pack in my child’s lunch box is not doing its job, the milk will not spoil.

My only wish for these milk boxes is that they would come in a Skim version.  The best scoring Horizon Organic milk is the blue one on the left (Reduced Fat Milk with Added Vitamin A and D).  It gets a 55 on the NuVal scale.  That is what my daughter drinks.  She calls it “Vanilla Milk” and we let her believe that!  My son, unfortunately, only wants the Strawberry or Chocolate variety.  We have not yet scored Strawberry, but the Chocolate only gets a 27.  Ugh!  Our hope is that we can wean him off of the flavored milk and move him onto the plain.  At least twice a week, we send him to school with one of the plain milks, and they come right back home untouched.  We will keep trying!

No matter what, these milk boxes are a better alternative than juice boxes and we know that they are getting the calcium and Vitamin D that they need.  And the lunch boxes stay clean.  It’s all good.

On to Favorite Thing #2:  Lunch Box Notes

My boss loves to shop at The Christmas Tree Shops and that is where she found these Lunchbox Notes.  It was so nice of her to pick up two packs for me as well.  Check out that low price!

Here’s the box without the price tag:

On the front of each note is a positive message.  My son loves this one because it sounds a lot like the Cub Scout motto (Do Your Best!)

My daughter loves this one, because as a beginning reader, she can read it!

And on the back is an interesting fact.  My son loves this one because he is into politics and presidents.

My daughter loves all things Human Body, so this is one of her favs.

Aren’t they the cutest?  You can find them at sayplease.com.  They are made of pretty sturdy paper with a special coating that you can wipe off, so we do that and re-use them.  I guess it makes up for the milk boxes we are throwing away!

So there you have it – two of my favorite lunch-making things.  Now, if only I could find myself a Lunch-Making Maid!

Question of the Day

What is one of your favorite Lunch Things?

Posted by: Melissa 9 comments

Posted in: Two Favorite Things

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