12 Super-Cool Kids' Bento-Box Lunches You Can Actually Make

Hungry for ways to jazz up your child's lunchbox? These adorable DIY bento-box lunch ideas -- crafted by blogger, author, and mom of two, Wendy Copley -- are sure to put smiles on faces and fill hungry bellies. Read on for her delicious tips, tricks, and inspirations to packing an extra cute lunches.

Garden-Inspired Bento

I made this lunch when the roses in my backyard were in full bloom. The ham roll-ups looked like rosebuds to me, so I added a few decorative picks with leaves on them and some silicone dividers that looked like leaves to give this lunch a garden feel.

The theme for this lunch was a teddy bear’s picnic. I started with a shoyu egg -- one that’s been marinated in a mixture of soy sauce, vinegar, and a little sugar -- then used an egg shaper to mold it into a bear shape. Now that my bear was ready for his picnic, he needed a checkered tablecloth (an apple), some hummus with an olive 'ant' on top, snap pea 'grass,' pretzel butterflies, and a pretty white nectarine.

I made this lunch for my preschooler when he was obsessed with cars and trucks.

Breakfast for lunch! Leftover pancakes with a fruit leather cutout, a tiny jar of syrup, blueberries, and chicken sausage slices.

When my older son started asking for packaged cheese-and-cracker lunches, this is what I made instead!

This was a simple lunch for a busy morning, but I took a few extra minutes to dress up the carrots, salami, cucumbers, and crackers by adding a few pieces of decorative Japanese baran, cutting a cucumber slice into a heart, and arranging the salami slices to look like a rose.

This lunch came about when my son asked me for a “silly 'Star Wars'” lunch, with a happy Darth Vadar. I started by adding storm trooper and Luke Skywalker picks to his blueberries and red bell pepper strips. Then I made some pickle light sabers. Finally, I cut his sandwich with Darth Vader and Yoda cookie cutters, and added big grins and icing eyes to make them look silly.

My boys love sunbutter and jelly sandwiches (no nuts allowed at their school!), but they can get boring after awhile. My little guy loves cats, so I cut his sandwich into a star shape and stamped out a kitty face on the top slice of bread with another cutter. The rest of the lunch had a banana with his name written on it with food-safe ink, clementines, strawberries, grapes, tomatoes, and Persian cucumber slices.

This autumn-themed bento features baked tofu with leaf decorations. I cut the tofu with a cookie cutter then colored the cutouts with food-safe markers. I also included an apple muffin with a pumpkin cupcake pick, grapes, carrots, and strawberries.

My boys love eating Halloween lunches, and I love making them. My older son prefers creepy over cute, so I made him this lunch with homemade tortilla-chip gravestones, black bean dip 'dirt,' veggies with a spider pick, berries, and a 'pumpkin' made with turkey spirals. The most gruesome part is a pumpkin muffin that I stabbed with a cookie knife. I made it 'bleed' by adding a little bit of red gel icing.

We don’t get snow in the San Francisco Bay area, but sometimes I  like to pretend we do with a snowflake lunch. This lunch had tomatoes on a snowflake pick, snowflake crackers, Clementine wedges with snowflake sprinkles, a couple of tiny snowflake sandwiches and a chunk of apple with a snowflake carved into the skin.