Dateline: third week of August—cue the violins. The prospect of soon needing to undergo the transformations necessary to get myself and my children out the door regularly and on time was enough to make me want to jump down the nearest hole and not come out until the groundhog saw my shadow.

My best advice, then, before you take another step toward making your kids’ lunches—back away from that fridge!—is to read the excellent articles on the Co-op website by Melynda Huskey and Jyotsna Sreenivasan.

Melynda’s tips about adapting the Japanese art of bento (including three or four different foods in small containers) and Jyotsna’s suggestions on packing a “snack” lunch got me through the inaugural months of kindergarten.

As Carol Spurling, another Co-op luminary, elaborates: “The thing that’s always worked for me is to have a variety of things from the bulk section—cracker mixes, nut mixes, dried fruit, fig bars, along with the usual goodies like carrot sticks with dip and yogurt and applesauce and tortilla rollups. The key seems to be a lot of variety and little amounts of each.”

While Melynda gets Lock and Lock containers at Uwajimaya in Seattle or Portland, she also recommends Laptop Lunch systems (www.obentec.com), which offers “a fabulous bento-inspired lunch box a little more suited to the typical U.S. lunch, and a great newsletter, The LapTop Times, with ideas to inspire a more interesting and environmentally sound lunch.” She also likes Lunch in a Box (http://lunchinabox.net) for its “handy tips and tricks” and recommends an online Japanese dollar store (www.ichibankanausa.com).

Using the oft-recommended freezer pack (buy an extra), I often went pragmatic last year: sandwiches cut in quarters, leftovers from dinner, unheated veggie dogs, Annie’s stars (not glamorous, but they got us through). I also included little containers of frozen berries (with a spoon), sugar snap peas, apple slices, orange sections, bananas, or peanut butter pretzels. Cheese in any form was unsuccessful.

My kids like yogurt so much that we bought small cups in cases to get the discount. My friend Lahde, who felt guilty about all the packaging, weighed the containers and discovered that reapportioning the larger size into smaller servings did not actually mean using less plastic. More recently her family was given a yogurt maker and now they make yogurt in little Ball jars and add their own flavors of fruit or jam. “That feels good,” she says, “though it’s not as enticing sometimes for the kids.”

My friend Amy makes quesadillas for her sandwich-averse child, and my friend Nancy, who always has great food ideas, said her kids love her cousin Iko’s rice balls. “They’ll eat the seaweed sheets from the package like it’s potato chips,” Nancy said. “They grab a whole sheet and it’s crunchy and salty.”

Nancy also suggests a new Co-op item, seaweed snack chips, which are “really yummy—I only wish the packaging was recyclable.” The package she tried to bring me mysteriously disappeared—she found only traces in her kids’ car seats.

One might imagine I was not eager to run through any lunch-packing dress rehearsals—and one would be right. In keeping with the bento theme, however, I was willing to give rice balls a whirl at someone else’s house. Looking at the rice and seaweed looking back at me, though, I didn’t know what to do: How to form the rectangularish strips of seaweed and free-standing grains, each with their individual thoughts and feelings, into something round?

“There’s no right or wrong. It’s just the experience,” my friend Laura observed helpfully, immediately contradicting herself as she eyed my attempt: “Well, it’s perfect, if you like that kind of thing.” Actually, as I squeezed the rice in my hands and pressed the seaweed to it, I could see a sort of beauty to the process. (As I remembered later, rice molds in, say, the shape of an elephant, are available for a dollar online.)

Fred really liked them, while Paul thought they needed sauce and “lacked another dimension”—precisely what made them great for a kid’s lunch, I thought. “I want more rice balls, Mom!” my daughter said after sampling her first. “Can I make some? Mom, this is a perfect one!”

Photo by Judy Sobeloff

Cousin Iko’s Super Simple Rice Balls

Brown rice, cooked

Sushi nori (seaweed sheets)

Rice vinegar

Optional: Ume plum vinegar

Optional: a tiny bit of honey or sweetener

1. Cook brown rice. (Nancy’s cousin, Iko, uses a pressure cooker so the rice gets really soft, but that isn’t necessary.) Leftover rice works fine, though it may need to be reheated with a little water if it’s too dry. 2. Add some rice vinegar and optional ume plum vinegar to rice and adjust to taste. Add optional sweetener as desired. 3. Form the rice into a golf ball-sized lump, as if rolling play-dough or squeezing snow into a snowball. Tear off a strip of seaweed ample enough to cover and wrap the rice ball in it. (Note: According to Nancy, the ume plum vinegar pickles and preserves the rice, which would be a plus for lunches sitting at room temperature at school. We sampled the recipe with both vinegars and no sweetener.)