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Cooking with my #LittleChefs & a cook-along chat

Last week I told you a little about my work with Chef Boyardee on their Little Chefs eCookbook. This week my kiddos and I tried out a recipe together! We cooked a Chef Boyardee recipe using Beefaroni, called Cheeseburger-roni. We had a great time cooking together, and the recipe was fast and easy!

We cooked together in preparation for a fantastic event on theMotherhood.com tomorrow afternoon that I hope you’ll join me for! It’s a “Cook-Along” chat on the “Fun with Flavors” chapter that I contributed to in the Little Chefs eCookbook. It’s a 30-minute text chat and we’ll have lots of great flavorful ideas for you! Check out all the details below!

When: Thursday, November 8, at 2 p.m. ET.  It will last 30 minutes.

Where: The Motherhood – here is the link to the page where the class will be held: http://bit.ly/TcCMzR

About the class: Have picky eaters? Try creating a new, quick and easy recipe WITH them!  Introduce them to fun new flavors, like dips and spices, and encourage them to help you pick ingredients and create meals. Little Chefs are more likely to eat food they helped you cook! For more tips and tricks, join us in this fun and informative Cook-Along.

To participate, just click the link above, log into The Motherhood using your member ID (if you don’t have one, it’s easy and free to sign up), and chat away in the text-based comments. We’ll also have a video feed running during the half-hour Cook-Along, so you’re welcome to show up simply to watch if you’d like!

The Cook-Along is sponsored by Chef Boyardee, and it is hosted by The Motherhood.  You can visit Chef Boyardee online at http://www.chefboyardee.com/ or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/chefboyardee.

I’ll be there with several other bloggers to co-host the class, and I hope you’ll join us!  The fabulous people who will be co-hosting with me are:

Jennifer, The Suburban Mom http://www.thesuburbanmom.com
Kerri, The Maven of Social Media http://themavenofsocialmedia.com
Sarah, In the Trenches of Mommyhood http://www.sarahviz.com
Shannon, The Mommy-Files http://www.themommy-files.com

I hope you’ll join us for this fun, creative 30-minute chat! We’ll give you some great ideas to get your picky eater into cooking and EATING the meals you make for your family!

______________

I am being compensated for my work on the Chef Boyardee Little Chefs project.

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Call me Sarge

This? Is accomplished through the sacrifice of my sanity!

You know what STRESSES ME OUT? Getting my big kids ready for school. We have a routine. It still makes me crazy. Bobby gets the kids up and gets them breakfast while I nurse Jonah who is incapable of sleeping in until I get the big kids ready, natch. Then, I come down and fuss at the big kids while they eat as s-l-o-w-l-y as possible and mess around (while Bobby is making school lunches). After I threaten them about 75 times, they finish eating and go to the restroom and begin getting dressed.

Which is about the time Jonah decided he needs to nurse again.

So while I shout drill sergeant commands at Sophie, who cannot seem to put her clothes on without being yelled at, I nurse the baby again. (YES, my life would be SO MUCH EASIER if I weaned him. But I haven’t had 10 days that I could let him scream at me non-stop. Which is what it took with Sophie. Lord help us all.)

I pry him off by the time it’s time to do her hair, and then he fusses at me and tries to push his sister off of me while I brush her hair and make her look like a living doll. Which is slightly difficult when a toddler is trying to push her away while I’m strategically placing hair bows and flower clips. But we suffer through it.

Then I send her off to  brush her teeth (Joshua’s already ready at this point, he generally has no problems once breakfast is over) and all of a sudden Jonah is happy again and goes and plays. Of course.

After all teeth are brushed, I coach the big kids through the CLEARLY arduous process of – gasp!- putting their coats and backpacks on!  And grabbing their lunch boxes!  It only takes about 27 minutes of nagging for this to occur.

Finally, Bobby appears, uniform on, and whisks them out the door to school.

And I resist the urge to go buy some xanax off the street and have a cup of coffee instead.

Tomorrow I think I’ll just stay in bed with Jonah and let them fend for themselves! I can’t stand being a drill sergeant all morning!

What’s your morning routine like? Tell me about it in the comments. Unless it’s all sunshine and roses and then I DON’T WANT TO HEAR IT!

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More Fun Toddler Learning Activities

He’s having fun! HE IS, I swear!

Since I am home with just my Jonah boy now, I have been a pinning fool the last couple of months, looking for toddler activities to do with him that will be fun and help him learn. I showed you a few a couple weeks ago, and now I’ve got some more we’ve tried and loved! In the picture above, he’s putting Scrabble tiles into a cocoa can with a slit cut in the lid. I also have him put Connect 4 checkers in it. This is good for his hand strength and fine motor skills as well as for his learning letters. And despite the expression on his face, he really does love to put things in, then have me open the lid, dump it out, and do it again! I’ve been really pleased with this activity for letter learning. So far he knows A, B, C, D, E, L, O, P, R, S, T, and Y! I think that’s pretty good for 22 months!

This next activity is somewhat similar.

Use Memory or other matching game cards to work on vocabulary.

We have a great Curious George matching game from the Wonder Forge (my fave game makers!) and I took some of the cards out of it and gave them to Jonah to put into this Huggies wipes tub. When he puts a card in, I say, “I see a ____.” – filling in the blank with whatever is on the card. So far, he has picked up the new words girl, boy, man, and bike from this exercise! Some of the cards have words he already knew and there are plenty he doesn’t say yet. When we’ve gone through all the cards, he of course likes to open the tub up and dump it out and do it again! The Huggies wipes tubs are good for all kinds of activities like this.

String beads on a pipe cleaner

This last activity we just tried yesterday and it was a big hit! I held a pipe cleaner and let Jonah put beads on it. He figured out how to do it pretty quickly and he really enjoyed it. He did ALL those pictured above before he got bored! He even did the last 5 or 6 completely by himself, holding the pipe cleaner in one hand and string the bead with the other. Boy, was I impressed! After he was done, he put beads in that empty spice jar in the picture for awhile before he was ready to get out of the booster seat. It has a really small opening on one side and he was able to get the beads in. The other side has a larger opening, so if he had needed to, he could’ve used that side. More “put it in, dump it back out” fun!

We’ve been having a lot of fun with these activities! I think I’m going to try and find him another inexpensive memory game for more vocabulary words.  If you try this with your kiddo let me know how it goes! And if you’ve got any more great ideas for playing with your toddler, feel free to leave them in the comments! Might save me some time on pinterest. 🙂

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