Light the World 2017

This year my church has put out the new initiative to light the world. It is a challenge to become more christ-like during this holiday season. In an effort to help my children, I have created this word strip PDF that I can print out and cut and make a chain. Each day we can rip off a strip, read the verse, and discuss is a family how we can complete the challenge. I'm sharing the PDF with you today so that you might be able to do this with your family as well.

Click here to view and print the PDF.

I hope you all have a fabulous holiday season.

Love, Morgan

1-2-3 Eat Lunch With Me

 

I wrote the title to this post over 13 months ago.
Which means that I did this activity with my oldest son over 13 months ago for the first time.
When I did it that first time I forgot to take pictures, which means I couldn't write this post.
And I didn't do it again with my son again until just a month or so ago - at which time I remembered to take pictures.

So if you see this activity and are thinking, "Wow, this mom does these cool things with her kids all the time. She's so fun with her kids and I'm the worst mom ever," just stop right now because I've done this twice with my kid in over a year. Hardly counts as 'all-of-the-time'.

If you didn't think that at all and you're now thinking that I'm nuts just carry on. I never think those things when I read mommy-blogs. Never. N-E-V-E-R.

Okay, anyway, to the actual post.

At the time I first did this my oldest - then almost 2 1/2 was just getting the hang of numbers. He could count to 20, but he didn't understand numbers in their context as well as he does now - over 3 1/2 years old. I thought it would be a fun way for him to understand what the numbers he knew meant, and encourage him to eat better. He still eats like...a toddler (hot dogs, cereal, plain fruit/veggies, candy) but maybe he ate better the two days I did this. Who knows?

What you'll Need

• The food you are going to feed your kid for lunch
• I like to aim for all the food groups. Cheez-Its are clearly a grain AND a dairy item...Yeah, no excuses. I feed my children crap.
• Toothpicks
• Pen
• Stickers
• I realize you can buy little flag stickers at all sorts of places, but I don't have them and wouldn't normally buy them. I had some rectangle stickers in 4 colors that I folded in half around the toothpick, cut, and wrote numbers on.
• Scissors (see Sticker commentary above).
• Something to put your kids' food on. Unless you put it directly on the table or a tray (hey no judging here! I get pelted with dishware almost every other meal...).

Then you get creative. How can you get 1 cheese stick to be a 3? Cut it up!

Poke your food and serve it up to the kiddos!

You can help them count all of their different options or let them eat the toothpicks until you realize they are actually going to eat the toothpicks and OH MY GOSH STOP EATING THAT YOU WILL HAVE SPLINTERS IN YOUR THROAT. No, that did not happen with my 21 month old. That last sentence was a lie.

This kid came in from grocery shopping with big alligator tears rolling down his face, but this lunch had him cheered up in a Jif (you see what I did there?).

Applesauce Painting

This year is the first year that our oldest understood Halloween a little bit. He was SUPER excited to be a Kangaroo for Halloween and to go Trick-or-Treating. He was still too shy to really actually say trick-or-treat, but he was excited about all his candy.

In perfect Halloween tradition, we picked up some pumpkins to paint and carve the Monday before Halloween. Even though our oldest was on board and loved painting his pumpkin, our 10 month old wasn't sold on being contained in his highchair for the extended period of time we anticipated our festivities. To hold him at bay I decided to mix up something edible and fun to keep him occupied while we perfected our pumpkins.

I simply mixed some food coloring into a few dallops of unsweetened applesauce and voila -> applesauce paints.

And now here are an abundance of adorable pictures of my babes (YWIA) ;)

So happy he gets his own spoon!

Want a bite?

Little goblin hands (eating some shredded cheese with dinner adds a nice touch)

Baby D with his 5 teeth and no hair (stem)

Besties

Our friendly Jack-o-lantern

So much concentration

After we got started and Baby D became greener and greener I got a little worried that he'd be stained green for a while. We usually bathe the boys at night right after dinner, so after our pumpkins and dinner were done D got a rinse-down and then a bath (didn't want to have applesauce and cheese floaters... ew). To my great relief, the green was completely gone by the end of D's splashing frenzy.

What are some things that you like to do to keep your smaller kids entertained while your bigger kids work on projects? Leave your comment below! I'd love to hear your suggestions!

Paint My Porch - Sidewalk Chalk Paint

Something I saw on Pinterest about a year or more ago was Sidewalk Chalk Paint. I wish I could find the original poster to share with you and give credit where it is due, but the recipe is probably on other blogs and it's simple enough I'm not sure it's unique to the site I pulled it from.

 Whenever I'm feeling like I'm out of ideas for entertaining my extremely active 2 1/2 year old I pull this favorite out. Discovering little, easy things to do like this always make me feel better about my parenting. I often get in a rut and am not sure what to do once my toddler's colored, read a stack of books, played with Play-Doh, and played with every toy in his box. Letting him get outside and paint on our porch is easy and it also let's him get creative and helps me avoid plopping him in front of a show on Netflix.

I'm obsessed with this picture.

The recipe:

Sidewalk Chalk Paint

• 1 part corn starch
• 1 part water
• Food coloring

1. Pull out a cupcake pan (lately I've been preferring my mini cupcake pan so I can mix up variations of a color i.e. lime green, forest green, teal, and plain green). 
2. Fill each pan a little less than 1/2 way with water.
3. Drop the desired food coloring into each pan and stir to combine.
4. Finally add cornstarch (equal amounts as you have water) and stir to combine.

I add the color first because I feel like it combines better that way.

The original poster recommended foam brushes for applying the paint to the cement. I found that the foam paintbrushes just fall apart when brushed against the rough pavement and so we use the wide bristled brush from a pack that I bought at Walmart as a freshman in college (similar here). 

Simply set the cupcake tin down and let your kiddo go crazy!

In the video I was having him use spoons and forks...get creative ;)

My oldest used to have all the colors mixed within minutes, but now he's much more purposeful about his painting and doesn't usually mix the colors! The great part about that is, we just let the pan sit outside and dry out when we're not using it and then JUST ADD WATER the next time we want to paint. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy!

I haven't had any trouble getting this to wash off. I usually just let the rain do it's job, but you can grab a hose and rinse it off too.

Here's our oldest playing with the Sidewalk Chalk Paint with his buddies last summer.

This is something that I've done several times with great success and I highly recommend it! Discovering that I can be an active and involved parent is the best feeling!