Mom Spends Eleven Hours Doing Lunchbox Prep For Her Children

Meal prep is one of the most useful time-saving hacks you can learn as an adult. Setting aside an hour or so on a Sunday evening can save you a lot of stress during the week, ensuring that you have satisfying meals to eat, whether it's at dinner, lunchtime, or both, when you'd otherwise be too busy to cook from scratch. But, as every meal prepper knows, even in the freezer, food only keeps for so long, and as a result, there is a limit on how much food can be safely prepared in advance.

However, this doesn't apply to foods which aren't easily perishable, or when you're preparing for more than one person, and one Australian mom used this as an opportunity to take preparing her kid's lunches to a whole new level.

Credit: Facebook / Lunchbox Mums

She devoted a whopping 11 hours to the task and subsequently prepared hundreds of snacks, including 60 pizza scrolls, 30 lots of pikelets, and 28 ham and cheese sandwiches. Proud of her creation, she shared the picture above on social media.

It was accompanied by the following caption:

"I am a first time Kindy Mum and after 11 hours of slaving away I now have 25 lots choc chip cookies, 35 lots of sultanas, 27 lots of grapes, 12 lots of snow peas, 20 lots of diced pineapple, 24 lots of carrot sticks, 16 lots of frozen berries, and 34 orange halves, 60 lots of pizza scrolls, 30 lots of pikelets, 28 ham and cheese sandwiches and 23 lots of assorted sizes of banana muffins. [sic]"

Credit: Giphy

And despite the fact that it clearly made her look like the Terminator of meal prep, she made a point of writing that she wasn't "super organized", she simply wanted to ensure that she was able to give her children lunch for a few weeks and added that everything she'd prepared was going to be stored in the freezer.

Credit: Facebook / Lunchbox Mums

"As of this morning, we have a chest freezer. The plan is to freeze it all," she wrote." I have two kids, but only one in school, as of tomorrow. The other is two. I do feel like I sold my soul. I don't cook at all, so this was a mission."

Credit: Pexels / Naomi Shi

The mom hadn't prepared this much food before, therefore she had no idea whether or not the more perishable snacks would last in the freezer, writing, "I've never done anything like this before, so we'll see how it goes!"

Credit: Pexels / Ella Olsson

Understandably, the post received a lot of attention on social media, with many parents praising the mom, who is Australian, for devoting so much time to ensuring that her children have nutritious lunches every day.

Credit: Pixabay

"You are insanely organized wish I had your energy to do all this it would make me feel like a super mum. Well done!" wrote one.

"You should be more than proud of yourself. I've been a Mum for 14 years and I've never kicked a*** like this!" remarked a second.

Credit: The Family Freezer

"Can you come do mine please," requested a third. "I spent hours in the kitchen and got nowhere near as much."

Credit: Pexels / Erin Wang

Not everyone, however, was entirely in favor of this mom's actions and some social media user slammed her for using so much plastic at once instead of simply preparing lunches each night and storing them in recyclable Tupperware.

"What a great effort! Massive kudos for that! However, I do worry about the amount of plastic used," remarked one critic.

"Awesome job. That's a lot of plastic though," added another.

Clearly environmentally conscious, the mom subsequently took the time to reply to her critics, explaining that the plastic used to store the food would be recycled after it's been transferred into her child's lunchboxes.

"My daughter has a yumbox. I will empty the contents of the snap lock bags into her lunchbox and recycle them," she wrote.

What do you think? Is this an achievable feat for any parent? Or would you rather take each day as it comes?