School is starting soon so we thought we'd throw out some ideas for packing quick, healthy Meatless Monday lunches for the kiddos. If you read our blogs regularly, you'll know that we unschool Z so we don't pack lunches daily. But we have times during the summer when she goes to summer day camp, and during the spring, Z and I had a weekly picnic between my gym class and Z's Kindermusik class.

Some of our favorite things to pack:

• Carrot sticks with hummus or pita triangles


• Fruit like cherries, blackberries, grapes, sliced apples with cinnamon, or other finger-sized fruits


• Cherry tomatoes or steamed broccoli


• Wasa Crackers and cheese


• A green smoothie (our favorite recipe - makes three servings - 1 banana, 8 oz frozen pineapple, and a heaping cup of spinach - dilute with water or coconut milk, blend.)


• A nut-butter and jelly or banana sandwich (if your school is peanut free try something like soynut butter)


• Mock tuna salad on bread, pita, or crackers


• Ants on a log


• Dried fruit and nut mix (we make our own based on what we have in the pantry)


• Cheese stick


• Granola bar


• Fruit leathers (we love the Fruitabu organic fruit leathers)

We usually pack a combination of items that offer a balance of fruits, veggies and proteins. We usually include a small treat like animal crackers or a square of fair trade chocolate for dessert. Z's not big on leftovers and there's rarely a place to heat them up so we don't usually include leftovers in our lunchboxes anymore - but make sure if you do, you include a ceramic plate for reheating!

If you have five extra minutes while you're packing your child's lunch, do something to make the lunch fun - cut the sandwich or bread slices into fun shapes using cookie cutters (you can do this with slices of cheese or fruit leathers too), include a quick handwritten note, make a portion of the lunch DIY or toss a few chocolate chips into the fruit and nut mix.

Tell us, what are your kids' favorite lunches? Also, what would you like us to address in future Meatless Monday posts?

And if you're looking for a good lunch box, check out either the PlanetBox or the Laptop Lunch kit or our other suggestions in the ZRecs Guide for Safer Children's Products.

Have you heard about the Meat Free Monday campaign? It's "an environmental campaign to raise awareness of the climate-changing impact of meat production and consumption" founded by Paul, Stella and Mary McCartney. We're vegetarians so every Monday is meat-free for us, but I'm thinking maybe we should challenge ourselves to have a lower-impact eating Monday. See, Mondays are the busiest day of the week for us - it's the day we're most likely to fall back on frozen, prepared (albeit vegetarian) foods. With a little advanced planning, I could probably prepare a healthier, more environmentally conscious meal that didn't rely on prepared foods. Here's ten of our favorite, easy to prepare vegetarian foods:

• Replace the meat in lasagna with veggies like broccoli, mushrooms, onions, and garlic.


• Green smoothies served with cracker, hummus and cheese make a nice light meal.


• Veggie tacos: Beans, rices, tortillas, and guacamole are all your need but you can sautee onions, peppers, and mushrooms for more robust tacos
  
• Beans and rice: Do it New Orleans style by using red beans, plenty of Tabasco sauce, and some bread on the side.


• DIY pizza: Make a dough in a bread machine or buy premade dough at the store (we've even used French bread in a pinch), and top with sauce and your favorite toppings - sometimes we just do cheese, sometimes we add sauteed veggies to the top.


• Brown lentils over rice with carmelized onions: This is one of the faster, cheaper recipes and it's so delicious!

panini - get some fancy bread at the store (or make it yourself if you're so inspired), add some sauteed veggies, olive tapanade, hummus, or cheese then grill

• Veggie pot pies are always a hit in our house, stuffed full of carrots, squash, mushrooms, green beans and covered with a cheese sauce in a pastry shell. Our favorite recipe comes from the Moosewood Celebrates cookbook. Bonus? Make two, they freeze great!


• Egg or tofu scramble: Add peppers, onions, cumin, and a touch of chili powder, serve on a tortilla shell for a savory breakfast at dinner.


• Rice and veggie sautee: Sautee and serve whatever veggies you have in the fridge on top of brown rice.

The health and environmental benefits of reduced meat consumption are well-established, but vegetarianism isn't for everyone. If you're a meat eater, have you considered participating in a weekly Meat Free Monday? For a month? For six months? For a year?

As a therapist, I became interested many years ago in what is called Brief, Solution-Focused Therapy. This is a model that doesn't focus on the problems in one's past, but looks toward the present and the future. It is a model based on the belief that the person has internal strengths that can be brought to bear on the perceived "problem." The therapist helps the client to begin exploring what they would like their future to look like and then teasing out times in life when that future is already happening. Questions are asked about when, where, and with whom that positive future is beginning to take place. Brief Therapy has three main rules:

1. If it isn't broken, don't fix it


2. If it's working, do more of it


3. If it isn't working, do something different!

One of the main contributors to this model is Bill O’Hanlon, M.S. One of his many books, Do One Thing Different teaches a common-sense approach to begin changing your life and solving your problems. The two main points of his book are that you need to 1) change what you do, and 2) change how you view things.

Albert Einstein stated that "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." We often become stuck in a problem and try to make big changes in order to "fix" the problem. Many people think that getting a divorce or changing jobs or houses will solve the problem.

These big fixes can be a setup for failure. We may have great intentions, but life gets in the way. O'Hanlon's premise is that making small changes will help to break the old patterns. Start small by trying something new, changing your old patterns! This is called "changing the doing." Doing more of the same in a situation brings the same results, even intensifies the problem instead of bringing about solutions. Sometimes changing only one thing can break up the inertia that is holding the problem in place.

In order to "change the doing," O'Hanlon suggests the following ideas:

• Make the smallest change you can make.


• Start with the least amount of time you think is reasonable.


• Focus on discovering the actions and the things you can change most easily.


• Change the timing of the pattern.


• Change the location of the pattern.


• Change your clothing.


• Change your body behavior.

To "change the viewing" try refocusing your attention. Try these suggestions:

• Change what you pay attention to in the situation.


• Focus on the future rather than what's gone wrong in the past.


• Try finding another frame of reference in the situation.

Give this a try! Rather than looking for a solution to your entire problem, experiment with changing just one thing. Then begin to notice what is different when you make the change. What works? What feels different? Who else changes when you do this one thing? How could you keep doing it?

Do something different this week!