Cooking

We had a fun filled week with lots of cooking activities! Here are a few things we did: 

(Click on the links to read more about each activity or get your own recipe)

Had the kids help make popcorn and then watched Ratatouille.

Had homemade copycat foods from some of our favorite restaurants:

      Chicken Cordon Bleu Pasta from Firehouse Pizzeria

      Sweet Pork Salad from Cafe Rio

      Chicken Enchilada Soup from Chilies

Sewed some cooking hats and aprons for our kiddos.  Tutorial coming soon!

Let the kids help in the kitchen (Let them feel like they were REALLY helping)
-Let them stir
-Unwrap things and throw trash away
-Set the table
-Add ingredients
-Be the taste tester
Here is a really good link to cooking abilities of young children!

Had fun pretending to cook:

We had some yarn out and walked into the kitchen to find this...he said he was cooking noodles!

Mixing water and milk

Rolling out pizza dough with his "roller"

And Really Cooking:

Making a special treat...

then taking it to their Uncle/our brother for his birthday!

Making a mini Pizza!

Building

Our two toddlers had a blast! These two are best buds, they probably feel more like brothers than cousins! Here they are having a little "Bob the Builder" night together!  They loved wearing matching PJ's, taking turns with the hard hat and bob and being complete BOYS! ; )

Our boys love to BUILD FORTS!!!

We also played with BUILDING BLOCKS! 

Here is a Tractor Tutorial if you would like to try BUILDING something fun together! ; )

We got daddy's gear and headed outside for some pictures....

Then we went on a walk and talked about all the building while wearing a hard hat!! ; ) I'm pretty sure the neighbors think we are nuts!

For our snack this week we built with pretzels and marshmallows, EASY and YUMMY!  If you haven't tried   Home-made Edible Play-doe you could give that a try too!

Enjoy and have fun building together!

Theme Week 15: Organization

This ended up being more of an us (moms) thing but we involved the kids too.  Here is what we did for Theme Week #15! You can click on the links below to read more or simply scroll down...the posts are listed in order. 

We organized the craft/sewing area

Created these Crafting/Sewing Tag Printables 

Organized the Toys (The kids helped with this one!)

Shared a few EASY organization tips

Organized Embroidery Thread

Showed how we use baskets and bins to organize

Shared 20 Things that make life for us as moms easier!

Have fun getting organized and having your little ones help!

Theme Week #14: Valentines Stuff!

Ready or not February is here!!  This week we did some fun Valentine things with the kids and also worked on putting together some fun Valentine's for the kiddos and loved ones!  Click on the links below to view the post.

Music

I love music,  it makes a HUGE difference in my mood.  When I'm running, the time on the treadmill goes faster when I have some tunes to help push me through.  When I'm cleaning, I actually clean faster and enjoy myself if I have some good music on.  When I'm driving in the car....My 2 year old stays pretty happy when I sing some of his favorites with him. We want our children to enjoy music too.

Camping...indoor style!

We love camping but don't get to do it very often...we decided to have our own little camping experience indoors with the kids! 

FARM

Our children really enjoyed learning all about farms. We learned about animals on a farm, farm work and equipment and did some really fun activities.

Cars

One of the kids favorite things was playing with their toys. We also did some fun car activities too!

Christmas & Traditions

The week before Christmas tends to be very busy so we decided to keep it simple and focus on CHRISTMAS. We also wanted to share with you some of the traditions that we have and things that we like to do this time of year. MERRY CHRISTMAS! We hope that you will enjoy learning about some of the fun things that we do this time of year. Our ideas are posted below.

Colors of the Rainbow

We have lots of fun activities and treats to share with you this week. Okay, we got a little carried away.

First of all a little background information of rainbows:

There are 7 colors in the rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet.

Our focus was on 6 of the colors: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue and Purple.

Ocean

Activities
One of my friends snapped these cute pictures of her kids "Pillow Surfing" They got all dressed up in their swimsuits and grabbed their pillows and went surfing right in their own home in the middle of winter. Aren't they adorable? The kids watched Soul Surfer and wanted to give surfing a try.

We found some cute coloring pages and interactive ocean things here.


We played ocean memory. Busy bee has cards already made that you just print and cut out. We laminated ours so they would last a little longer. Click here to find ocean memory.


A two year old isn't the greatest at playing memory the way it's supposed to be played so we put the cards right side up and searched for the match.


Then we lined them up like a train. ; ) Not with the this weeks theme but he just loved it!


We also watched lots of ocean/under the sea movies. We watched Finding Nemo, The Little Mermaid and the Reef. These matching fruit snacks were fun to eat while watching.
















After watching Nemo we blew some bubbles of our own. This was a great way to release some of this guys energy!

We also bought a fish and learned how to take care of it. We bought a Beta. This little man loves feeding it each day.

The little pellets that Beta's eat are pretty easy to measure out. Another fun thing to do is hold a mirror up to the fish and watch his face fan out. Betas are fighting fish so it's a defense mechanism.

We also made "Waves in a bottle!" This was super easy and fun for the kiddos to make there own waves. We used an empty pop bottle but you could also use an empty water bottle. Then we added water to the bottle with a couple drops of food coloring and topped it off with vegetable oil. I also tried to explain how water and oil don't mix to by 2 year old but he was to excited making waves to care.

We had lots of fun doing fun ocean activities we always do like reading books about the ocean or doing this fun puzzle. One of my favorite things about "Theme Week" is that a lot of the activities that we do a lot seem to become fun and exciting again and not so boring.

We watched The Little Mermaid in these laundry basket boats. After the movie was over we put a bunch of toy fish/bath toys on the floor and caught them with our net.

You could also watch a movie on a beach towel or in your swimming gear.

We also went sock fishing! This was by far my little kiddos favorite activity...we did it at least 5 times through out the week. It was really simple too. We just put magnets in the toes of random socks and lay them out on the floor behind this chair. I tied a ribbon to a stick and glued a magnet to the bottom and then let my little guy fish away.

We made this simple paper plate fish and then colored it.

We also made this "Under the Sea" sensory bag. We filled a freezer bag with blue hair gel from the dollar store and then put beads in it.

We also got this Turtle from Wal-mart for $1 and had fun watching it grow and then shrink again. They have all sorts of Under the Sea animals like a Starfish, Crab, Turtle, Eel and an Octopus.




Here are a few other ideas of things to try:

• Let your child Snorkel in tub
• Go to an indoor aquarium and learn about all the fish
• If you live near a beach or lake take a walk along the beach, gather sea shells.
• Play the game Go Fish
• Explore salt water....just add a tsp of salt to water and let your child taste it.
• Go fishing in the bathtub.
• Play fish, fish shark instead of duck duck goose.

We also sang the fish song while doing the actions:

Fish Song

One, two three, four, five (hold fingers up while counting)

Once I caught a fish alive,

Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten (hold up more fingers)

Then I let it go again.

Why did you let it go

because it bit my finger so

which finger did it bit

this little finger on the right.