Our mornings are now crisp and the long sleeves are finding their way onto our shoulders come dusk. That means it's Back-2-School!
September is the time to get back into the habit of making brown-bag lunches for the whole family and not in one giant cooler for a weekend at the lake. With the help of a couple moms and dads here at Jem, we've collected a mini list for parents to help make that first week Back-2-School a breeze.
Mini List to a Breezy First Week Back-2-School:
- Take breakfast seriously! Wake up a little earlier to fuel yourself with nutrition. Eggs, oatmeal, veggies, lemon water and your hot beverage of choice. Don't forget hardboiled eggs and overnight oats speed up a morning by at least 15-minutes.
- Cook for the week on Sunday. Use Sunday evenings to rest at home and make large portions that can last all week long, or least until Wednesday. Chicken roasts, doubled-batches of spinach muffins (photographed below!), pre-cooked lentils, the list goes on.
- Sunday, before you start cooking, make a list and hit the grocery store with a plan.
- Always have a pan of enchiladas in the freezer just in case! Or grab the family and go out somewhere new and leave dishes to another kitchen.
- Pack fresh veggie snacks with 1oz Jem almond butter jars!
- Update the brown bag with a stainless steel snack box; check out the ECOlunchbox that separates your meals.
- Bliss Balls –– another recipe to double up on and keep you and the kiddos fueled all week long. This one they should make by the way.
- Snack consciously. We've been really diggin' Red Plate Foods cookies where we know everything that's in them (and can pronounce each ingredient) but they're also 100% allergen free!
- Involve your kids: sprout your own greens, and nuts at home and consider a veggie scrap window sill garden they can manage into the winter. We sprout our nuts, alfalfa sprouts, celery roots, mescalin greens, and sunflower sprouts in our kitchen window. Starting a cookbook for kids is super fun too –– it can be in a simple notebook, but it encourages them to track what they enjoy, pay attention to the process, and get creative with drawing the finished meals!
- Start getting ready for bed an hour before bedtime. If bedtime is at 8pm, Netflix and Hulu are done at 7! Use this time to get organized but also be together over a book, talk about all the fun things and people they get to look forward to tomorrow morning! To avoid a hot mess of a bedtime, sometimes bargaining with getting ready for bed during commercials helps––which if you're involved, becomes a game and quality time.
We hope our tricks help make your back-to-school week a tiny bit more blissful than maybe it's been in the past. All in all, as long as everyone is healthy and happy at the end of the day, it was a success.
Our best,
Jem
Shop our sprouted, stone ground, organic, vegan, gluten-free Jem Butters online now!
Spinach muffins covered in Jem Cinnamon Red Maca Almond Butter.
