All year long, I clip those little “Box Tops for Education” thingies, and the kids bring them in to their school. I didn’t know it until this school year, but the Box Tops program also has something called “Marketplace,” where certain online stores donate a percentage of your purchase to the school.  I’m doing a lot of shopping right now ANYWAY, so this is a nice way to help the school without having to volunteer to help out at the Winter Fair (*shudder*). Plus, as it turned out, it was an excuse to do a little giveaway, and I really like doing giveaways.
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My kids’ school (and I hope it’ll excuse me for saying so) is a big, no-fun poophead.  Every year I look forward to back-to-school shopping, every year I wait eagerly for the back-to-school shopping list—and every year it’s all “One box 24-count (NOT 48-count!) crayons, one box #2 pencils, two dry-erase markers (one must be black; the other may be red or blue or black), NO Trapper-Keepers, NO pencil boxes.”  Tell me this, then:  what can I do with all this awesome back-to-school stuff from Etsy?

Aqua retro floral pencil pouch.  I want to eat it on toast.
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Back-to-school preparation isn’t something that’s particularly on my radar yet since my kids are still mostly in the Anklebiter Stage of childhood, but I’ve been hearing a rumor that this most glorious time of year is fast approaching. 

With schoolgear in mind, today’s post features some cool lunch boxes I’ve found recently. If you’re looking to branch out from the tried-and-true paper bag, here are some excellent alternatives:
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When my oldest son went off to preschool, he needed a backpack.  I liked the idea of the Lands’ End and L.L. Bean ones, but why would I pay five times the price of a Walmart backpack?  So I bought him a $5 Walmart backpack, and it wore out in March when of course Walmart didn’t have any backpacks to replace it with.  I repaired it with packing tape and my crappy primitive sewing skillz.

The next fall, for kindergarten, I bought another Walmart backpack, but this time I got the one that was more like $8 instead of the one that was around $5—going for quality, you see.  That one, too, ripped before the end of the school year.  It was very frustrating.

So when my aunt gave us a gift certificate to L.L. Bean, I used it to buy L.L. Bean Original Back Packs for both of my older boys:  one for Rob, who was then going into first grade, and one for William, who was starting 4-year-old preschool.
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