Fruitable Juice Boxes

My daughter has had a problem with her thermos leaking. It's a two part problem: 1. she doesn't put the lid on tight enough and 2. she doesn't drink the juice at lunch time.

I had $6 in my checkbook this weekend when I used my debit card to buy an $8 bottle of medicine for her over the weekend so needless to say the budget is tight and my husband will be hanging on to that car registration renewal for another day or two to keep our checks from bouncing.

But school lunch at her school is extra nasty this month... and she wants to pack three days this week. So, I need to fix this thermos problem. I've already tried reducing the amount I put inside and she still "doesn't have enough time" to drink it.

Today I used a small water bottle. And I found $3 in my wallet so we went to Giant for juice boxes. Juicy Juice boxes were on sale 5/$10, so the cheapskate in me wanted those. But I noticed that the Adam and Eve juice boxes were 2/$5. I discovered a "fruitables," like a V8 Splash. They had three flavors, one was berry.

At 50 cents more a pack, that's 6 cents a juice box and child gets 10% of her vitamin A and 10% of her vitamin E. I wonder, is it worth it? They're only 66% juice versus 100 which leads me to ask, what's the other 34%? So I read the ingredients:

Adam and Eve Fruitables

• Apple Juice concentrate
• sweet potato
• butternut squash
• strawberry, raspberry and some other juice concentrate I can't read under the wrinkle in the plastic
• filtered water
• vegetable something (darn crinkled plastic)
• added vitamins

Once again, nutrition via processed foods. But if you're going to pick a juice box...