Food, Family, Fun.: Christmas

Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts

Monday, December 16, 2013

Jolly Holiday - fun blog hop.

As mentioned last week I am joining in on another blog hop with the Bento Bloggers and Friends. There are actually 4 hops in total this year. I have only joined in on the middle two, the last one will be on Dec 19th. You can find links to them all here.

This is Amy's Jolly Holiday lunch.

Amy has the jolly old man himself for lunch. Her sandwiches are chocolate and peanut butter spread shaped like Santa's hat and his best reindeer pal, Rudolph. She has lots of fruit - half a clementine, strawberries and cantaloupe. Trix yogurt and greek yogurt combo complete her lunch. It was time to grocery shop so we were out of all of the raw veggies that she likes.

I have continued to pack the LunchBox Love FREE printable holiday jokes. The kids are loving these jokes.
Q: What do you call Santa when he has no money?
A: Saint Nickel-less
Hardy har har!

Now on to the fun holiday blog hop. Click the button to hop on over to Bento Days to see what Jean has made. There are 15 blogs to hop through. When you hop back to me you will have seen them all!

Friday, December 13, 2013

Holiday fun!

A cute little holiday fun lunch for Heidi.

Turkey sandwich shaped like a stocking with mini marshmallows and sprinkles, trix cherry yogurt and greek yogurt mixed together, cantaloupe & strawberries. I also packed her a banana on the side.

You might notice that I have been mixing trix yogurt and greek yogurt together lately. The girls love the trix yogurt and I like the extra protein and less sugar in the greek yogurt. Plus is makes it just a little thicker and less likely to make a mess when they are eating. Perfect combo for school!

Inside Heidi's lunch is a little holiday joke. It also came from the free printables set on LunchBox Love that I posted yesterday. Here's that link again.

Q;What do elves learn in school?

A: the Elf-abet

Ha!

You might notice a couple of raindrops on Heidi's lunch. I like to take my photos outside when I can and I almost made it in time! A surprise sunshower came over just as I was taking the photo. I quickly snapped the picture and ran inside, lunches in tow. There were hardly any rain drops on her lunch so it worked out ok.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Season's Eatings - A holiday blog hop

Today I am joining in on a blog hop with the Bento Bloggers and Friends. There are actually a series of holiday hops this month. Stay tuned as I will be participating in another hop next week!

For today's hop I made a fun Gingerbread People themed lunch for Rosie. Tonight we are going to have a gingerbread cookie baking evening in our house. It seems like everyone needs to bring cookies for something tomorrow! We're going to go with gingerbread people. Amy has to bake and decorate a bunch for her Brownies party as part of her cooking badge. I expect that we'll all have some fun in the kitchen. I"ll try to snap some photos to share.

For lunch Rose has greek yogurt & cherry trix yogurt mixed together, half of a clementine, cantaloupe, strawberries, and a marshmallow gingerbread boy. Her sandwiches are her favourite chocolate & peanut butter (who wouldn't like that?) filling. I cut them into the shape of girl and boy gingerbread people.

I tucked a fun joke in her lunch. These jokes are free online printables from Lunchbox Love. You can find them here. The joke Q: What did the gingerbread man put on his bed? A: a cookie sheet! haha. Kid's humour, I love it and I know that Rose and her friends will too!

This post is part of the Season's Eatings hop. Click the button below to hop on over to Student Bento to see what eatings Stacey has made for the Season ^_^. There are about a dozen or so blogs participating. When you hop back to this post you will have seen them all. Enjoy!

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

A trio of trees

My mojo has been lacking lately. I have been making lots of healthy lunches, they've just been a little low on flair. Here are some recent lunches. All of the girls had similar lunches, keeping it easy for me!

Heidi's lunch

Heidi has strawberries, half a banana, green grapes and a tree shaped sandwich ( probably ham but I can't remember!)

Amy's Lunch

Amy has cucumbers yellow peppers, green grapes, strawberries, goldfish and a tree shaped sandwich

Rosie's lunch

Rosie has yellow peppers & grape tomatoes, green grapes and strawberries, goldfish crackers and a tree shaped sandwich.

There are slight differences in the lunches as their favourites are different - banana is one of Heidi's favourites, cucumbers are one of Amy's favourites (she would never eat a banana!), bell peppers of any colour are definitely Rosie's favourite item in her lunch. So even though these are mostly the same they were each happy to have one of their favourites for lunch.

Almost everything was eaten. Rose left a bite of sandwich and Amy left the peppers. It was a trial, she still doesn't really like them. And is case you are wondering what happened to the other half of the banana - baby sister Emily ate it for breakfast. She LOVES bananas too.

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Gingerbread House 2012

I realise that Christmas was last month and a Gingerbread House post is sort of out of place in January but I still want to share our Gingerbread House. I ended up with a bit of a long blogging break over the Christmas Holiday It wasn't planned, just sort of happened. With the girls out of school I really enjoyed spending time with them and our family and blogging took a back seat. Now I want to catch up!

So again we went with the Gingerbread House kit made by Wilton I really think it's a good way to go instead of baking the house from scratch. I bought a few marshmallows and some extra candy to go with it but you certainly could make due with what's in the box. This year, somehow, I made the Royal icing a bit too thick. It worked out OK but was hard to squeeze. In general our Gingerbread House procedure went as follows. I am in charge of assembly and the icing. The girls tell me where to put icing and they glue on the candies. This year we also used some squeeze tube coloured icing and I let Amy use that on her own. We used a muffin tin to keep track of the candies again. I forgot to take a before picture so this is an after photo. Obviously there was lots of candy on the house already!

This is such great fun. There's a little laughter, a little candy and icing eating and everyone ends up happy and proud of their work.

Rose and Heidi wanted me to take a picture of them sneaking into the photos. Goofballs.

Emily was still a little too young to help but maybe next year. She did try to sweep the floor afterwards in the hopes of finding some stray candies I'm sure! She was most upset that I wouldn't give her any but they were all choking hazards. I did give her a little taste of icing though ;)

This is one of the Gingerbread House kits and these are the brands of icing that we used for the coloured icing. It worked quite well to "glue" the candies on the house.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Ho Ho Hopping for the holidays!

This time of year is so busy for us. It's a little tricky to keep up with lunch photos and I must admit that I have scaled back the cuteness a tad in the girls' lunches. I made these lunches yesterday and suddenly realised that there are only a few days left of school! The time has flown by so quickly.

Here is Rose's lunch

carrot sticks, apple slices, raspberries with white choolate chips, snowman marshmallow

tree shaped pretzels and a Christmas tree sandwich & a LunchBox Love note about Christmas trees

I love these little notes and the girls do too.

Amy had almost exactly the same as Rose but there was not enough time so I took one photo only. She wasn't going anywhere near those raspberries or pretzels so she had goldfish and extra apples instead.

My bento blogging friends are having another hop and this post is part of the hop. This time it's a holiday themed hop spread out into three shorter hops over three different weeks. This is week two. At the end of the post click on the button to hop through all of this week's hops and then also check out the Bento Blogger's and Friend's Blog to check out Week 1 (live on December 6th) and Week 3 ( live on December 20th).

Heidi's lunch

carrots sticks and dip in the EasyLunchBoxes mini dipper, apple pieces

stocking sandwich with sprinkles and marshmallow snowmen

red mini cup with a gummy vitamin inside

I made Heidi's lunch a little later in the morning and left it in the fridge until she came home at midday. I have an activity at school every morning this week so we are even busier than usual. Yesterday I went with Rose's class on a field trip to a senior's residence and sang some songs and delivered holiday cards that the children made on Monday's craft morning. They sang a Baha'i song, Hanukkah Song, Kwanzaa Song and two Christmas Songs. They did a great job! Today is Amy's holiday musical concert and thankful lunch and Friday is her Creative Writing Workshop presentation where the children will read the books that they have written and illustrated this term. I am looking forward to the school break and spending some time at home with the girls :) Hopefully you will all enjoy a little break too!

Now onto the hop.

Click the button to visit Lunch Snack and Sninner to see what holiday lunch Tracie has come up with. If you keep hopping until you get back to me you will have seen them all. There are 17 fabulous lunch blogs in total.

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

New cookie cutters!

It feels like Christmas already -- first a new camera lens and now new cookie cutters! This cutter set is great. I bought if from Amazon using a link from another blog. The set looks great and they are a great size for sandwiches but I can't wait to make cookies with them!

Amy's lunch

grapes, carrot sticks, goldfish, half a pear and a Christmas tree stamped sandwich

Rose's lunch. She had the same except she had seasonal shaped pretzels in stead of goldfish

It's time to go grocery shopping! We were at the end of the grapes and almost out of all fruit. The smaller portions in lunch are helping a bit and almost everything is being eaten again.

Sunday, December 9, 2012

North Pole Breakfast and our new Elf on the Shelf

I caved into the pressure. I bought the Elf and the kids LOVE it! They named their new elf Snowflake and this is the breakfast when he arrived for the first time. I had originally wanted to start on December 1st but Amy went to a friend's birthday party sleepover so we postponed 1 day, starting on December 2nd. I had a few other fun touches that were meant to be added but the special items didn't arrive in time - so I am saving them for some fun elf scenes in the coming weeks.

The girls had - raspberry mini muffins, snowballs (powdered donuts), Hot chocolate with marshmallows, whipped cream & sprinkles and a few elf kisses. Snowflake bought them all new pajamas and a book for Emily instead. I had printed up a menu and was planning on making these cute reindeer pancakes but they didn't want any! Another day then.

Each place setting had a little namecard, a fun plate and a new Santa Mug (from Gibbon's Company). The new plates that I had ordered did not make it in time so thankfully I had some fun holiday serving trays and I used those instead.

I typed out an introduction letter using these party printables and we also read the book in the morning. Well Amy read it to her sisters. I just cuddled on the couch with them :)

I think the hot chocolate was the highlight!

Rose woke up early, tried on her new pajamas and then promptly got dressed!

I purchased this stationery set from PaperGlitter and set it up so that they could write letters to Santa.

That was fun. Heidi wanted me to write for her. "Santa I really like you and please bring me these presents." Right to the point <3

All smiles! Those little blue 80's style glove things were a party favor from the birthday party.

She wore them ALL DAY!

Snowflake has had a few adventures so far. Nothing too crazy. She took a ride on a dolphin, brought the girls the Elf on the Shelf DVD and watched it and tonight she is hanging out in our Christmas tree and decorated it with some reindeer candy canes. She is definitely a nice elf and I don't think she will get up to much trouble ;)

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Santa Claus is coming to LUNCH!

Santa Claus sandwiches for lunch.

Rose's lunch

ranch dip, carrots, red & green grapes

honeydew melon, Santa sandwich

Amy's lunch

peanut butter, carrots, red & green grapes,

honeydew melon, pineapple, Santa sandwich.

Now for the bad news... I made them on a FRIDAY which was hot lunch day. UGH! They weren't eaten as they could not compete with PIZZA. The funny thing is that I totally knew the day before that it would be hot lunch on the last day of school but I forgot by the next morning. I blame sleep deprivation! I can laugh about it, but jeez - what a waste of a sweet little Santa.

Here's a close up.

provolone cheese beard & hat, candy eyes and a mini M&M nose.

School starts back tomorrow - looking forward to a new year of fun lunches :)

Saturday, December 31, 2011

First ever gingerbread house !

I wasn't originally too keen on making a gingerbread house with the girls. There was just so much going on in the house I thought it would be a bit of a disaster - finding a pattern, making the pieces, assembling the house etc. all while caring for sweet baby Emily. Enter the gingerbread kit! My Mom bought us a Wilton gingerbread house kit and nonchalantly gave it to the girls a few weeks before Christmas. That pretty much sealed the deal - we were making a gingerbread house!

I did a few Internet searches and saw some different ideas and a few tips on making gingerbread houses with children. 3 tips stood out: use a kit and save yourself any baking drama plus younger kids enjoy the candy part the most, not the baking and assembly and waiting part, buy candy that is NOT your children's favourites (so they eat less during the process) and put the candy in a muffin tin so it's easy to choose and also keep the work area tidier without a bunch of opened candy bags strewn about. Win, Win, Win. The kit came with some candy but I bought a few extras just in case - I fully expected some to be eaten as we worked and we all did ;)

Here's our candy all set up:

I made 2 muffin tins to share between the 3 girls, I manned the royal icing bag.

Christmas dots, M&Ms, spearmint trees, traditional hard candy mix, fruit swirls, spice drops all bought by me. The kit included a few gummy trees, a few flat gumdrops, and the little colourful round candies.

I didn't get any action shots. I took a few on my phone which turned out terrible. It really was a pretty busy event and stopping to snap photos was not going to happen. Perhaps next time, now that I have one gingerbread house under my belt!

Here's our finished house:

Rose didn't want to stop decorating once we finished the house and walkway, so we added an entire front yard that she decorated. Can you see the little orange doorknob? Amy's idea - because how does the gingerbread man open the door!?!

The better side!

Rose was very proud of her Christmas Dots pattern on the roof.

The failed attempt at window curtains side - LOL!

There must have been a wicked storm 'cuz those trees are leaning :)

The back spice drop design

All in all I think I thinned the Royal icing too much. I knew that I was planning on doing the assembly one day and the decorating the next so I thought that *slightly* thinner icing would be better as I expected it to stiffen up a bit after being left in the bag overnight. Well it didn't really, so next time I won't do that. It wasn't a major problem I just had to get the kids to hold the items on for a bit before letting go. I think they did a great job overall.

This activity was SO FUN! I feel so silly for being afraid. The girls had a blast and we will make one every year from now on I'm certain. The kit made it really easy too. The pieces were precut, a base was included, all you have to do is add water to the icing mix and put it in the enclosed bag then assemble and decorate. Could. Not. Be. Easier.

Thanks MOM for *encouraging* me into a fun activity!

Ornaments a plenty!

So many cute mini cutters - just had to try them out :) So we have Christmas ornament lunches.

Rose's lunch

cheese and crackers with ornament shaped cheese (only the front one has the food writers), pineapples, ornament shaped watermelons, Christmas tree with mini M&Ms

Amy's Lunch

Christmas bulb clementine, string cheese, pineapples

ornament shaped watermelons, Christmas tree sandwich with mini M&Ms

I KNOW that I saw this clementine bulb somewhere else - it was definitely not my original idea. I will try and find out where I saw it and give credit.

Friday, December 30, 2011

Santa's sleigh

I don't know what happened this morning! I can only assume that we were running late. It looks a little like time was up :)

Amy

carrot sticks, half a clementine, pineapple

watermelon reindeer, Santa face and his sleigh.

Rose

same as above but including ranch dip (that's how I know it's Rosie's)

Heidi's lunch

clementines, string cheese, watermelon reindeer,

Santa's face and sleigh sandwiches.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Christmas trees - take 2!

These are lunches from the same day as the Sassy box Christmas tree, so yup they are the same design. Rose had really wanted the new blue lunchbox, the other two still wanted their planetboxes.

Heidi

Strawberries, watermelon, goldfish, pineapple

Christmas tree sandwich with candy dot ornaments.

Amy

Same as above except the cheese present instead of goldfish. Then after I took the photo Amy says - I'm not eating that cheese. So guess what? I took it out and gave it to Rose, her little square went to school empty.

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Sassy food container

This is the first time using our new the Sassy baby food container set. I got them locally at People's. They have pink and blue sets. I have 2 pink and 1 blue. I really like it but need a little practice figuring out how to best arrange items. I have been using the planetboxes so much I haven't really had to think about it!

Rose's lunch

Christmas tree sandwich with candy dot ornaments, cheese presents,

the green mini cup is ranch dip, grapes, strawberries, carrot sticks and pineapples.

The food writers have still been getting a workout!

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

O Christmas tree!

Wow. It's been a crazy-busy holiday month. So many school activites, holiday events and organising and I hardly posted any of the girls' lunches! I will try and post a new lunch each day from the past few weeks to catch up. School is on holiday and I won't be making any new packed lunches until the new year but I have several to share from the end of school.

Saw this and decided it was too easy to not copy it!

Heidi's lunch

Cheese sandwich Christmas tree with mini m&m ornaments,

grapes & strawberries

She was out of school a few days before her sisters, so this was an at home lunch only for her :) She ate the fruit first - not even the candies. <3 her.

Pages

Monday, December 16, 2013

Friday, December 13, 2013

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Friday, December 30, 2011

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Tuesday, December 27, 2011