Mind Games

My kids have loved Muffin Tin Meals for as long as MTMs have been a mini-phenom in kids-and-family blogging.  In the last year, though, we made fewer and fewer muffin tin meals because the six adorable little cups don’t always provide enough food for either of my two high-energy, ravenous kiddos.  Here is one way we’ve been using them lately:

…to hold toppings.  This morning, we had steel-cut oats for breakfast.  (Here’s where I admit that I am not an oatmeal fan, even though the other three people in my house adore oatmeal.  Steel-cut oats are my exception, though…  even I enjoy them, because they are so much nuttier and have a far better texture than rolled oats.)

Having six different toppings set out in a muffin tin in the middle of the table is a fun way to encourage exploration (coconut-and-apricot?  blueberry-and-almond?) as well as to bring a more communal feeling to our meal.

If you’re looking for more fun food ideas for your kids (and really, what mom isn’t always on the lookout for something different to put on the table?) head over to Muffin Tin Mom.

Can you go camping… without actually camping?  We did…

One among many plans to be displaced around here in September was the long-awaited Navigators’ campout for the kids, which had been scheduled for the Friday after Labor Day.  The counties were still under a state of emergency then, and backyards were swamplands, so we couldn’t go.  But I had planned some camping activities for the week, to help my kids prepare for sleeping outside and cooking over a fire, and we had already started our camping theme before the storm hit.

Our book basket included Maisy Goes Camping, The Bear Scouts, Bears in the Night, Just Me and My Dad, Franklin in the Dark, What’s Under the Bed, Amelia Bedelia Goes Camping, The Chizzywink and the Alamagoozlum, and The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night.  These picture books were great for GoGoGirl and helped give her a starting point for talking about being scared in the dark on a campout, especially Franklin and What’s Under the Bed.  KarateKid liked the humor in Bear Scouts and Me and My Dad.  We read and sang The Fox Went Out several times each morning and listened to different versions of the song.

For science that week, we studied nocturnal animals, read from several of our nature books about them, and sketched a bat from the specimen my sister carefully preserved for us.

Before reading our books on nocturnal animals, I asked the kids to tell me what they knew about nocturnal animals.  As I expected, KarateKid had a good grasp on the concept, and GoGoGirl really didn’t.  At one point in our discussion, I turned to her and asked, “Do you know any other nocturnal animals?”  She told me, “Dinosaurs!”  I paused.  After a moment to decide how to handle this response, I went with a gentle, “Honey, dinosaurs aren’t alive anymore.”

GoGoGirl, hands on hips: “You have GOT to be kidding me!”  There’s a pause, and the look of gears turning in her head.  Then, with indignation: “WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM?!” as if I’ve spoken some shocking revelation about cute and cuddly dinos who were alive just last week!  Moments like that are why I adore being home with them and being in on the nitty gritty of learning that dinosaurs aren’t alive anymore – split my sides laughing and loving her.

Other resources we used included a Camp Out! playlist I put together on Spotify, which included lots of fun camping songs and several versions of The Fox Went Out.  We also used several pieces of the Camping Preschool Pack from Homeschool Creations (especially the counting cards and 3-part cards) and some from 2 Teaching Mommies (they loved the roll-and-graph).

The kids also spent a lot of time this week playing with their dollhouse tent and several dolls, and using the playsilks to make a camping scene.  I love the brown “woods” fabric we have – it is silky and lovely, and was 50 cents at a garage sale about two summers before I even had kids.

The kids each made a construction paper and marker picture using collage and drawing techniques.  I cut several triangles and rectangles for GoGoGirl and helped showed her how they could be glued down to look like a tent – from there, I let their imaginations go!

These pictures were mostly inspired by Maisy Goes Camping, as GoGoGirl tried to imagine how many of her friends or animals could fit in that tent. POP! Out came Maisy!

We also made campfire handprint paintings – the kids loved this!  Start by painting the pinkie side of your hand brown, then stamp it on the paper twice, making an X shape to be the logs.  Next, paint the palm of your hand in reds, oranges, and yellows and stamp it down above the X to be the flames.

Naturally, we had special camping food too. We ate marshmallows and mini s’mores, pork and beans, and one delightful camping-themed Muffin Tin Meal!

I made roll-up sandwiches with whole wheat wraps, turkey, cheese, and carrots – when cut into sections, the kids think these make great logs! We also had little smokies on teeny weeny roasting forks, and goldfish crackers that we’d just caught in the stream. Washed it all down with bug juice, of course!

So, the kids got a week full of camping experiences, even if we never made it into that tent.

I’ll be sharing this post with stART, Read.Explore.Learn, What My Child is Reading, and Muffin Tin Monday.  Check out the links to find more creative activities!

The very beginning of our big circus celebration was last Monday, when we created a lovely circus lunch.  I waited to share it until today, which is Under The Big Top day at Muffin Tin Mom!

GoGoGirl was excited – but also hungry! She grabbed an extra biscuit to keep her happy while she waited for lunch.

Many times, the kids help me put together our muffin tin meals, or even choose and create them without me. But this week I had a few surprises in store. KarateKid couldn’t wait!

What was under the big top?

Time to reveal the treats!

In our one-ring circus, the kids each found two animal crackers atop tiny biscuit stands (decorated with red gel icing), a peach yogurt clown (with blueberry eyes, raspberry nose, and icing hair and mouth), peanuts, popcorn, and a mini hot dog (little smokie baked into a bit of biscuit dough).

The kids ate several of the extra mini hot dogs and finished the big bowl of popcorn besides eating what was in their actual tins!  They were pretty hungry that day.

You can read about our circus books and art projects on a post from last Wednesday.

To see more Under the Big Top meals, head over to Muffin Tin Mom!

I’m late in posting this… but on July 19th we received a box of goodies in the mail from our Muffin Tin Swap partner, Lisa at Nanny Diaries!  The kids were so excited, and we used our goodies that very day for a Muffin Tin Meal!

The kids tore into the box, thrilled to see what was in store. Lisa is the nanny to six kids…

…and she sent us three large cookie cutters, a box of six tiny cookie cutters, two sets of polka-dotted liners, and two sets of polka-dotted picks… one set was homemade, with laminated flags on toothpicks – very cute, and so sweet to receive a homemade gift!

The kids were excited to use our goodies right away.  We used them in a very typical tin, for us – ham and turkey, bread and cheese, grapes and yogurt – but they were excited to cut the meat, bread, and cheese into new shapes (the tiny butterfly was the favorite) and to use the new picks to eat grapes and chunks of string cheese.  We even used the new liners for our yogurt!

A big thanks to Lisa, and to Michelle at Muffin Tin Mom for organizing this swap!  We had a great time choosing gifts for Lisa and using the gifts she sent us.  Can’t wait for the next swap!

To see more great tins, head to Muffin Tin Monday!

The best holiday treat for me is having MechDaddy step in and take over a little bit of the work behind the celebrations.  For the Fourth of July, he got up with the kids to have them help make our brunch: waffle sticks with syrup, berries, and yogurt.  I came downstairs once the first batch of waffles was hitting the platter.  Yum!  I’m so lucky.

You can see our festive Muffin Tin Brunch: waffle sticks, strawberry syrup, and more waffle sticks, followed by blueberries, vanilla yogurt with holiday sprinkles, and strawberries.  Delicious!

Head to Muffin Tin Mom for more yummy meals.

Even though it’s only May 3rd, the theme of today’s Muffin Tin Monday over at Muffin Tin Mom was CINCO DE MAYO.

We had an odd weekend, where all day Sunday I was positive that it was only Saturday.  I didn’t do any of my weekly planning or my grocery shopping yesterday.  So today, when I sat down to write out a grocery list that includes four cool celebrations over the next three days, I didn’t remember Muffin Tin Monday, because it didn’t quite feel like Monday yet.

The kids couldn’t forget, though, and fortunately they reminded me!  Since we’re having enchiladas on Wednesday and taquitos on Thursday, we decided to have quesadillas today.  Quick, easy, and both kids love them.

We had guacamole and pico de gallo for dipping, plus some baked tortilla chips and some (microwaved) fried plantains.  (You can’t buy ripe plantains, so I couldn’t have made them from scratch the same day I did the shopping!  Fortunately the kids like the Goya brand microwaveable ones.)

We also popped in Family Music Party, one of our very favorite cds from Trout Fishing in America, and listened to Pico de Gallo on repeat while we ate!  Don’t get it in your eye-o, unless you wanna cry-o… o/’

How can you not laugh along with, “It was Cinco de Mayo, we were down on the bayou, with our good friend Venus de Milo. We were watching Hawaii Five-O.  She wanted some French fry-o’s, or maybe apple pie-o, and I said Why, oh why-o?  We got Pico de Gallo!” We’ve loved this song for a long time, and today was the perfect day to dance to it over and over!

To see some more south-of-the-border tins, head over to Muffin Tin Mom!

We love the phrase “Eat a Rainbow” and say it to ourselves as we’re grocery shopping to encourage ourselves to try new fruits and vegetables to fill out that color palate.  You can read here about the different vitamins, antioxidants, and the other good phyto-chemicals found in the different colored fruits and veggies.

This week the theme for Muffin Tin Monday was Rainbow, so we had a fruit rainbow for brunch:  red strawberries, orange oranges, yellow lemons, green kiwi, blue berries, and purple grapes.  KarateKid went with me this weekend to do the shopping and choose the fruit, and he put the tin together this week all by himself while GoGoGirl and I played in the living room!  What a treat!

Both kids are fruit-lovers and gobbled this tin up, asking for seconds and thirds!

I also found this fun little Eat a Rainbow game to print out from the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, and we played it while we were eating.  I like this quick game because they’ve included clip art of fruits and vegetables of various colors on the cards.  In this game, you draw a hand of cards which are both color-coded by the color of the food and also numbered.  Each round, the players flip over one card from their hands.  Whichever player flipped over the card with the highest number gets to choose one of the revealed cards to put on her plate.  The first player to fill her plate wins!

Instead of printing out the included “plates”, though, I made colored spaces on real paper plates to make the game more appealing to three-year-old GoGoGirl.  I also made a double set of the cards so that we could play with our whole family.  (Using the double set, if there is a tie, each person who played the highest value card gets to keep that card on her plate.)

We are keeping the plates and cards in a gallon-size bag, and already the kids have started to add their own “house rules” to the game!  KarateKid likes to add up the total on all your cards at the end and have the highest total plate be the winner. Because GoGoGirl can’t yet compare two cards and understand that 19 is more than 13, we made a color die to go with the game.  In the toddler-rules version, we separate the food cards into piles by color and on our turn, roll the die to see what color card we can pick.  The 6th side of the die is a wild star, and you can take whatever card you like.

We’ve had fun playing this game and talking about all the nutritious, different-colored foods!  I hope this free game will become a favorite in your house too.

For more Rainbow-licious Muffin Tin Meals, head over to Muffin Tin Mom.

Happy Monday!  Time for another meal served up in small bites in a muffin tin or muffin cups, hosted at Muffin Tin Mom.  This week there’s no theme (because of the holidays) and so my kids chose to have breakfast in their tins!

GoGoGirl picked the flower muffin cups and KarateKid picked the blue tin.  Both kids had pieces of one huge blueberry muffin, strawberries, yogurt, and oatmeal.

To see what other families love to eat from tiny cups, head over to Muffin Tin Monday!

Another Monday, another adorable meal eaten from a muffin tin.  My kids love Mondays just for the fun of lunch!

This week, the Muffin Tin Monday theme at Muffin Tin Mom was the color GREEN… just in time for St. Patrick’s Day.  KarateKid and GoGoGirl are still sick, so we are having another at-home day & we worked lots of art into the day just like we did last week with the color yellow.

First we read these books…

Little Blue and Little Yellow by Leo Lionni – a fun story about making green; Jack and the Leprechaun by Ivan Robertson; and It’s St. Patrick’s Day by Rebecca Gomez.

Then the kids made coffee filter shamrocks while I put our tins together. I set out droppers of water, one with blue food coloring and one with yellow. The kids dripped and dropped blue and yellow onto shamrocks cut from coffee filters and made beautiful green shamrocks!

Next, it was time to eat!

Green veggies (cucumber, celery, broccoli, and green pepper) with green-dyed ranch dip, and a green kiwi. We also had green “Hulk Shakes” – smoothies made from orange juice, banana, frozen strawberries, and spinach. The kids loved the new fancy green mugs I picked up at the store this week!

After we ate, the kids used the extra parts of the green pepper to stamp and make shamrocks!

Our green pepper wasn’t the perfect shape for doing this, but they let their creative juices flow. GoGoGirl wound up pretty much fingerpainting the entire paper green. KarateKid made a cute leprechaun out of a handprint – complete with pot of gold and shillelagh!

Instead of dumping out our extra colored water from making our filter shamrocks earlier, we poured it into a couple of vases and put in some white flowers… both kids are excited to watch the flowers turn green by St. Patrick’s Day!

While KarateKid worked on his math (yes, when you homeschool, you can do your multiplication on a slate, using sidewalk chalk, lying in bed – isn’t homeschooling the best?), GoGoGirl used two new transfer set-ups with a green theme. She spooned green floral glass marbles from one bowl to another using a small metal scoop, and tiny green split peas from one tiny metal bowl to another using a tiny wooden spoon.

I had one more green project up my sleeve before nap time… cutting out green hearts from construction paper and using them to make shamrocks. The heart-cutting was too hard for three-year-old GoGoGirl, so I wound up cutting out some hearts for her while she snipped the scraps into tiny green confetti. When her shamrock was glued down, I added the “S is for shamrock.” KarateKid made his own shamrock and then used some extra green and yellow paper to make a green pot full of gold to hide behind the shamrock.

It was a wonderful GREEN morning here!  To see more green muffin tins, click through to Muffin Tin Mom.

Colored foods are the name of the game this week over at Muffin Tin Monday, and this week the kids were all eating fun meals inspired by the color YELLOW.

Since my kids are sick (both have pink eye and GoGoGirl has bronchitis as well), we had to stay home today and miss our drama, gymnastics, and karate classes.  To make up for it, I decided to take the YELLOW theme and streeeeeeeetch it all through our day.

We started with YELLOW BRICK ROADS.  After the morning medicines and a light breakfast, the three of us curled up together in bed for two hours to read aloud the Charles Santore version of The Wizard of Oz.

I love this version: it is long enough, at 94-picture-book-size pages, to satisfy KarateKid’s hunger for a long adventure and detailed story, but the illustrations appear on every page, sometimes taking up entire two-page spreads, and are lush and lovely enough to satisfy GoGoGirl’s desire to soak it all in visually.

It is an abridgment of the original text, specifically a careful condensation of the text, done gently so that virtually no language other than Baum’s own is used.  I love that, because too often I seek out an abridged version of a classic tale only to wince at the changes made in language, style, and tone.  This one is lovely.

I have to add that my kids are not familiar with the movie version of The Wizard of Oz.  We don’t own it, so KarateKid has only seen it once, a couple of years ago.  The books are so much richer and delve more deeply into the fantasy world that it seems a better fit for KarateKid to fall in love with the world first, through the books, and then view the movie as an interesting interpretation of what he already loves – in the same way he loves Harry Potter and Percy Jackson.  I think he’ll soon be interested in the original Baum novels, as he can read this version aloud with ease.

This is the first time we’d read a long book aloud to GoGoGirl, and it has been forever since I needed to read one aloud to KarateKid, and so I’d forgotten how dry my throat can get.  I was giddy at the realization that KarateKid and I could now swap off every 20 pages or so.  I’ve never really heard him read a novel aloud, just funny passages here and there or picture books to his sister.  I was absolutely charmed by his skill & theatrical nature as he read the Emerald City scene – he had a blast doing the voices.

When we’d finished reading, we decided to use some yellow paint to create our own brick roads.  I’ll be linking this project up with stART this week over at A Mommy’s Adventures!

First, I gave the kids long pieces of paper from a roll we have.  I poured yellow tempera paint into Styrofoam trays from our reuse box, and gave them each three types of kitchen sponge: a small rectangle, a large rectangle, and a large rectangle with metallic bristle lines.

Next, I suggested to the kids that they could use the sponges to stamp yellow paint onto the paper as one way to make a yellow brick road.

GoGoGirl is definitely not feeling herself today, but the paint perked her up a bit.  She had fun stamping with all the sponges and using extra colors of paint too.  She proudly showed me her wonderfully messy hand.

KarateKid loved the idea of the project, and after he’d made a whole road, I gave him two cookie cutters to use to stamp some people along the road.  Here’s his finished project:

While the kids were stamping and painting and creating at the kitchen table, I was making our lunch.  Originally I was going to make this meal as a brunch today before going out, so the foods are breakfast-y!  We had cornbread (made in muffin tins) and mini crustless quiches (made in muffin tins) as well as some yellow fruits – bananas and pineapples (only bananas for GoGoGirl, who is allergic to pineapple).

I even set out my yellow footed muffin cup to be our butter dish!

The mini quiche are very easy: I simply mixed 3/4 cup of egg beaters with 3/4 cup of shredded cheese, and then mixed in some crumbled bacon and sauteed onion and yellow bell pepper.  This made 9 mini quiche which baked for about 18 minutes at 375F.  I’ve done them before in the silicone liners but used paper today so the liners would also be yellow… that was a mistake!  They do not come easily away from the paper liners!  Do not try this at home; use silicone liners or simply a greased muffin tin instead.  The tops and insides were quite yummy, though.

After an extra-long siesta (GoGoGirl slept for more than 3 hours), we decided to fill the late afternoon hours before dinner with another messy yellow activity!

You might need a little background story for this one… you see, tomorrow we had planned to go to a Beatles Sing-Along at a homeschooling friend’s house.  We’d have missed it because of the illnesses, but it turned out that she needed to reschedule, so we’re hoping to be healthy by the time she’s ready to host a houseful of rockin’ homeschoolers.  We’ve been listening to the 1 album (all their songs that hit #1) in the van lately, so we have Beatles on the brain.

So… the kids played Yellow Submarine, in our own weird way.  We got out a big ol’ bowl of lemon pudding that I’d thrown together, (many, many sale-price boxes of lemon pudding mix later…) and got messy!

Yes, that’s a bowl of pudding…

…with a toy submarine in it.

We also dumped in most of one of those little tubes of plastic toys – sailboats and ocean liners and divers and submarines.  I also put on “Yellow Submarine” repeating on the cd player.

The kids also had fun with measuring spoons and little plastic cups. GoGoGirl, in particular, loved filling these up and then dropping a guy or a boat in one and hollering, “OOPS!”

KarateKid, like me, enjoyed the sensation of squeezing the pudding through his fingers, letting it drip down, plunging both hands at once into the deep bowl of pudding.

Then he figured out that he could make a little fountain – and a fart noise! – by squeezing his hands together in just the right way.

The kids had a blast with the pudding, and played with it for almost an hour. I had saved a small bowl of uncontaminated pudding for each of us to enjoy after the messy fun was done, too. It was absolutely worth the time to make the pudding & the effort of cleaning it up afterwards to get this look on the face of an otherwise miserably sick girl:

The whole yellow day was a success: we had enough calm activities to rest weary bodies, enough interesting activities to distract us from running noses and watery eyes, and enough fun to make us all smile!