Cool Find: FooGo Kid Thermos

If you don't have kids or you live in a place where the Thermos brand doesn't exist, feel free to bugger off to another blog or look at this, this, or this.

Are they gone? Thank God! As for the rest of you, come closer and let me share my latest find.

With M in preschool, yours truly is now expected to pull a nutritious and tasty lunch out of her nether regions FIVE DAYS A WEEK. Given the complete lack of success I've had thus far (the preschool teachers kindly--or perhaps scornfully?--stuff all uneaten food back into M's lunchbox so I can stare perplexed at the leftovers and wallow in my inadequacy) I was beginning to worry my child would get rickets or scurvy (neither of which, in spite of the humorous slant of this post, are laughing matters. just ask my grandpa).

So I decided to try another tactic: enlist M as a lunch spy. That's right! After a few well-placed comments mixed with a dash of "let's play a fun game! It's called tell mommy what your friends had for lunch," I convinced M to pay close attention to what her pals were eating at preschool and then report back to me.

At first, my plan appeared to have one or two major flaws.

Flaw #1) Most three-year olds have the attention span and memory retention of a gnat

Flaw #2) Most three-year olds are incapable of providing nuanced descriptions of what their friends are eating

This resulted in a few false starts, ranging from "My not want to talk about lunch all the time!" to "Well, one girl had crackers and something else...something red...it spilled on her shirt and she cried. then teacher came and took her to the bathroom. and she got a sticker! My wanted a sticker too..."

But then, on day three of the mission, I hit the proverbial jackpot. When I asked M what her friends were eating for lunch, she told me one of the girls had pasta. My ears perked up. "Pasta? Was it cold?" M shook her head, "No. She ate it out of a big thing with a spoon." A big thing? Hmmm. "A bowl?" M shook her head again, this time with a slight roll of the eyes (as if to say, God my mother is a moron. This doesn't, BTW, bode well for the teen years). "No mommy. My said it was a big thing! Not a bowl. It was shiny."

At that moment it clicked. Shiny, big, hot food. A Thermos! A-ha!! I'd finally found a loophole to the "please don't send lunch items that need to be heated up prior to eating" rule. And really, one has to wonder how idiotic I am to have completely overlooked Thermoses in the first place.

Off I popped to the Thermos web site where I found this. And then off I popped to Amazon to see if I could find it for less (I did) and in pink (I did). Now we are the proud owners of a Foogo (by Thermos) leak-proof food jar. And the damn thing actually works!! As in, the food stays warm for hours. Not only that, it's eco-sensitive and chemical free....and even if the food inside is boiling, it won't scald little hands. It's also the perfect size for small lunch bags.

Glory Hallelujah!

So should you find yourself in need of a mini-Thermos for your child you can, thanks to moi, skip the whole research thing and go straight to the store. No need to grovel. A simple thank you will do. Or if you insist, a gift card to Burke Williams Day Spa.