Have you heard of the new sensation that is sweeping the nation? All the hip and trendy kids are going back to school this year with Bento Box lunches. Not really, but that’s what I told my dd on her first day of Kindergarten. LOL You see my dd is super picky so I am very limited on the types of food that she will eat, which makes doing a real bento very hard to do. Most consist of faux sushi cream cheese wraps or even real sushi etc. My dd would not go for that so I just went and got a round container that has 4 sections, the middle one is a cup that has it’s own lid, and have been sending her lunch in it each day. I found out that Hello Kitty makes boxes that would be perfect and may go get some. I bet ’A’ would love them. Anyway here is an example of what she gets (each day she has plain pasta (she hates sauce), her choice of fruit, lunch meat, and gold fish. Then she has a juice bag with it. Until today her pasta was in one of the larger sections, but she wanted it in the middle today. She also asked for more fruit, hence the strawberries and green & purple grapes.
I use my Pampered Chef creative cutters set to cut the meat into fun shapes (today’s was a flower). I love the cutters because they are smaller and I feel like I am getting more out of the meat than I would a larger cutter. They come in a set of 8 and each set contains a maple leaf, shamrock, pumpkin, apple, chili pepper, flower, heart and star. Greatest $10 investment I’ve ever made. 
Anyway, so all you Bento veterans who wound up here by googling for bento ideas- am I on the right track here or have I missed the train? 
She did tell me that one of the teachers in the lunch room commented on how cute her lunch was and that she really liked it.
Man, makes my old-timey school lunch of a PB&J sandwich with a snack-size bag of Doritos look sort of lame.
You’re on the right track! They have Hello Kitty Bento’s in Green, Pink, and Blue at the Dollar Tree. I got mine at the Dollar Tree across from the Golden Triangle Mall in Denton. They had 2 styles and even drink containers.
Oh and the Dollar Tree also had this cool contraption for making square eggs which my kids thought was awesome. You boil the egg, peal it and place it in the contraption, then stick it in the fridge for an hour. When you take it out it is square and you can make cool little egg slices, your children could amaze their friends with the unexplainable square egg! 
Seriously cool lunch container and food. I’d eat that sort of faux-bento box lunch, and I’m not a kid.
(Somewhat ironically, we had actual bento box dinners tonight.)
Yeah, you are on the right track. The heart of Bento is to please the diner. “love in a box.” Whatever she likes and will eat and is nutritious is what should go in the box. the cute shapes are just a way to make a “sack lunch” more appealing.
I started packing my son’s lunch because I thought it was cute, but it has gotten to the point where he’s seeing the advantages. He gets interesting food, he can sit down and eat right away, no standing in line, and he likes the notority of having a mom who makes an effort. (OK, he did draw the line at the Hello Kitty box.)
Keep it up. there are a lot of great sites about how to speed up and CUTE up the bento.