When I was in grade school in the late sixties and seventies, the lunches most mothers packed were somewhat uninspiring. But while the other kids got peanut butter and jelly or spam on Wonder Bread, my mother sent me to school with more eclectic offerings like cream cheese on homemade date nut bread, peanut butter and bananas, and deviled ham. I loved those lunches, but while they tasted great (and made my classmates jealous), I don’t remember being especially jazzed about how they looked.
Singapore-based mom Li Ming, however, goes the extra distance with her kids’ lunches. She sends her sons to school with Instagram-worthy one-of-a-kind bento boxes. Showoff.
“I started making charabens (Japanese boxed lunches) when [my older son] went to primary school in 2011. He missed me terribly then and had problems adjusting to the longer hours at primary school. I started packing him charabens, hoping to cheer him up and let him feel my presence and love through them. My younger boy loves the charabens I make for his brother and requested for them too.”
-Li Ming
Not satisfied with just creating gorgeous-looking, nutritionally-balanced lunches for her kids, the busy mom also shares step-by-step tutorials on her blog so we can try our hand at making them, too. How does she manage it?
You can follow Li Ming’s adorable Bento Monsters on her blog and on Instagram.
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My OBT 
July 20, 2019 at 6:12 am
Those are such fun!
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July 20, 2019 at 11:12 am
They really are. What a marvelous mom she must be!
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July 20, 2019 at 12:49 pm
Absolutely!
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July 20, 2019 at 6:41 am
Wow!
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July 20, 2019 at 11:13 am
So much creativity and energy!
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July 20, 2019 at 12:20 pm
Indeed, and almost too stunning to be eaten.
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July 20, 2019 at 7:39 am
Great imagination …and a lot of time.
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July 20, 2019 at 11:14 am
It’s the time thing I can’t wrap my brain around.
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July 20, 2019 at 10:40 am
How cute are these?! I imagine opening my lunchbox and having my classmates ooh and ah over my lunch. And then the nuns come over and tell us ‘there is no talking at the lunch table!’ Gotta love the fact that you survived Catholic school….
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July 20, 2019 at 11:15 am
LOL. I had 12 years of Catholic school, too, but we were allowed to talk.
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July 20, 2019 at 9:10 pm
These are all so joyful and I am impressed by the creativity but mostly I am impressed that she has the mental stamina to create these lunches because, quite frankly, I find it exceedingly difficult to be arsed with just making my mob basic packed lunches. Making packed lunches during the school year is the bane of my morning and I just cannot imagine a universe in which I could muster up the energy and motivation to make something this fun. Teaching in a preschool, I have looked in a lot of lunch boxes but I have only, so far, encountered one parent who made super-cute and fun lunches for her son.
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July 21, 2019 at 9:06 am
It does seem pretty crazy that she can find the time and the energy. For me to get up to something that creative in the morning would require recreational drugs and a time machine.
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July 21, 2019 at 3:11 pm
Honestly, even if I had additional vim and maybe Hermione’s Time-Turner, I still probably could not be arsed. I learned early on that my kids don’t get suckered into eating squat just because I have made it look extra appealing so I also have zero motivation.
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July 21, 2019 at 3:48 pm
That’s a really good point. Do her kids actually eat the lunches?
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