Iverson Elementary student’s mother tells imaginative stories via his lunch bags

The staff and students of Iverson Elementary School have been following the adventures of Swithbert the anglerfish all year. It has become one of the most popular stories in the school, but it isn’t in a book, on television or in a movie. It’s playing out on 9-year-old Carter Cebrzynski’s lunch bags.

“I thought we were in our own little world with it, but I went into the office one day and I got a really warm welcome,” said Carter’s mother, Emily. “The staff told me that everyone has been enjoying the lunchbags.”

Cebrzynski has decorated all of her children’s lunch bags over the years; Carter’s two older sisters since have graduated. Initially she would put a few stickers on the bag and make a picture out of them. The more she did, the more elaborate they got, until this year, when each bag became part of a long story told in lunch bag form.

“If I’m sitting with him when he does his homework, he does better, so I just sat with him and added more and more detail to the bags,” Emily Cebrzynski said.

School aide Irma Nielsen noticed pretty quickly that something special was going on.

“I do a lot of duty in the lunchroom and I saw these amazing lunch bags, and I started sharing them on the overhead projector and everybody loved them,” Nielsen said. “He’s so excited to share them with the other kids.”

Cebrzynski has been making up the story as she goes along, incorporating characters and settings from some of Carter’s favorite books, television shows and movies.

“My son is a fan of (BBC science fiction program) ‘Doctor Who’, so I brought him into the story,” Emily Cebrzynski said. “It started out this year in the ocean with Swithbert going back to school. He got taken by aliens, which my son loved. He was rescued by Doctor Who and he took him back to the ocean and they met up with a leviathan that stole the TARDIS, Doctor Who’s ship.”

That led to a long adventure in which the Doctor and Swithbert hop through portals and stargates into different worlds. Along the way they meet up with the Minions from “Despicable Me,” Peter Pan, Phineas and Ferb, Harry Potter, Jack Skellington and The Little Green Men from “Toy Story.” They also take a ride in the DeLorean time machine from “Back to the Future” and visit Oz, where they encounter Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow. Oh my.

Cebrzynski said most of her family has artistic talent. She took a few classes in school but didn’t make art her college major. She didn’t think of the drawings as something that would be around for more than a day.

“At first Carter wasn’t even saving them,” Cebrzynski said. “After all, they’re just lunch bags.”

Staffers from the school started asking if they could keep the bags, which led to the display in the school’s library. There, librarian Emily Holm has been mounting several bags onto construction paper, laminating them and displaying them.

“I’m so impressed with the amount of detail she puts into them,” said Carol Crammer, who teaches art at the school. “They’re so beautiful. She even matches the font to go along with the picture.”

Cebrzynski has taken photos of all of the lunch bags and posts them on social media, but publication would be out of the question because the art borrows so heavily from licensed characters. That was never the goal of the art anyway.

“It’s fun spending time with him while he does his homework,” Cebrzynski said. “It’s also really made him look forward to going to school, seeing where the story goes and sharing it with everyone there.”

To reach East Valley View reporter F. Andrew Taylor, email ataylor@viewnews.com or call 702-380-4532.