I know today’s tip doesn’t sound exciting. Every weekday, however, I pack cold lunches for the girls to take to school. At the beginning of the year, I bought these cute little animal gel packs to keep their lunches cold. Emmy still has hers; but Lily’s gel pack wasn’t sealed properly and the gel started to leak out of it. I had to throw it away.

Ice in a Ziplock bag just melts and leaks all over. As an alternative, I sometimes freeze a yogurt tube. The frozen yogurt acts as an ice pack in my daughters’ lunch boxes, and the yogurt slowly thaws enough  to eat at lunchtime. But I can’t pack yogurt every day. The following tip sounded like the perfect solution to my ice pack problem when I spotted it on Pinterest.

I buy pop-up sponges from Trader Joe’s. They come in a package of 12 and are very thin. Just add water, and the sponges “pop up!” Lily and Emmy love popping up these sponges.

To make an ice pack, all I did was saturate the sponge with water, slip it into a Ziplock bag and put it in the freezer overnight. In the morning I had the perfect sized ice pack.

The idea is that as the ice melts, the sponge will soak up the water. I wasn’t positive it would work, but I was willing to give it a try. I put the frozen sponge in Lily’s lunch box, and asked her for a report when she got home.

Lily told me that the sponge was still cold at lunchtime and it hadn’t leaked at all! I put the sponge right back in the freezer, and I’m going to use it in the future to keep cheese sticks and applesauce cold in Lily and Emmy’s lunches.

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