Our Harvest Week Celebration

Last week we celebrated the Autumn Equinox with a Harvest Week Celebration, and a Harvest Feast!

Of course we had to decorate and add some festive harvest decor!

I drove an hour and a half round trip to get these great corn stalks. It was worth the trip!

All the large pumpkins pictured are from our pumpkin patch! Aren't they beauties?!

One of the crafts the kids made last week were napkin holders using fall colored beans and pasta. 

This is one of the place mats I made for the feast. Each child had their own using a picture I took that week. These were the cutest turkeys I've ever seen!

Fall themed games with leaves and pumpkins featured heavily through the week.

Some of the families brought in their harvest shares this week. Here's is a wonderful squash from Eric's garden. I can't wait to replant the seeds!

For the feast, everyone brought a locally grown garden fresh harvest dish to share. It was sublime!

Henriikka and Eric brought cheesy potatoes, using fresh potatoes from their garden, with a side of homemade salsa using fresh veggies and peppers form their garden. 

Laura and Joel brought a homemade raspberry cheeescake using fresh raspberries from Laura's dad's garden.

Jessica brought homemade applesauce and zucchini bread, while Kaelonnie brought homemade apple butter to spread on the bread, made by Tayson's grandmother.

Zach and Desi brought us fresh salad with garden tomatoes, a wonderful variety of veggies including bell peppers, apples, carrots and zucchini, with delicious hummus dip. 

Liz and Brad brought devilled eggs using fresh eggs from a local farm.

The kids were all so excited about the feast. They loved talking about what each person brought as they were eating and loved knowing where their food came from. Liz even included a whole egg to show the kids from the farm!

The feast and the whole week were so much fun to celebrate. Thank you to all of my families for your participation and help to make our feast such a success!

Picture Pancakes

This morning was picture pancake day! It's something we do about once a month. For now it's random and a fun surprise for the kids when they arrive. 

We make oodles of fun pictures and shapes for breakfast and letters for everyone's name. Then the kids have to figure out whose name each letter goes to for a quick literacy lesson.

This is the bumblebee I made today, and I also made hearts, stars, squares, triangles, circles, happy faces, clouds, trees, flowers, sunshines, pac-man ghosts, snakes, worms, a Portuguese Man-of-War, fish, spirals, and more. Other months I've taken requests for spongebobs, princess crowns, people, cars, trains, Phineas & Ferb, Big Bird, spiders, and houses.

I make my own whole wheat batter and make it healthier by sprinkling freshly ground flax seed to the wet side right after I pour the batter onto the skillet. Adding the flax directly to the batter before it gets poured changes the consistency and makes it thicker, too thick to make proper shapes. Plus, when flipped, the pretty side is clean and the underside has the flax, something the kids don't even notice! We topped it today with homemade cranberry sauce that I made using honey and cranberries, plus a few extra dried ones for fun. 

Kale Salad

Some of the goals of the snack station are to encourage self help skills and healthy food choices. The snack station gives the kids more control over when and how much they eat. Often it's a party tray or smorgasbord of many different things, but today it was something simple like our Kale Salad. 

The salad itself is very basic, but with lots of good things in it- tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots and kale. I used a simple oil and vinegar dressing with a little fresh parmesan to give it some flavor. Is this their favorite? Of course not! :-) But they do readily eat it and like to talk about the things in their salad while they share a healthy meal together with friends, and that is a positive and healthy food experience that I am glad they get to have. 

  

Yay! Garden Shares!

This week and last week a couple of my families shared their garden bounty! Thank you Laura and Joel (and Laura's dad!!) and Henriikka and Eric for such beautiful and delicious garden treats! 

Oatmeal Breakfast Cookies

Today we mixed it up with some delicious breakfast cookies. These are the EASIEST cookies in the world. They have zero bad stuff, and lots of good stuff. And they are delicious. 

I made banana-oatmeal-raisin-walnut breakfast cookies. The only two ingredients you actually need are the banana and oatmeal. The rest is all optional and based on your own preferences. 

I added raisins to mine today but you could also use chocolate chips or carob, cranberries or other dried fruit of choice. I dumped in the rest of what we had in the jar, maybe a cup's worth?

Quick cook oatmeal is likely easier, but since I buy mine organic it's not quick but it still works out just fine. I hand grind it up a bit as I put it in the bowl and a little after to help it bind a little better. Again, I dumped in the rest of the oatmeal that we had, which was probably 2 cups-ish.

You'll want to use ripe and old bananas, but you can just as easily use fresh ones. I used 5 bananas today, which was the rest of what we had, plus the mix was still too dry with only 4 bananas.

I like walnuts for brain food for the kids so I went with those, but pecans would have been yummy, too! Also, next time I make this I will add a lot more walnuts because I think they work really well in this recipe. I chop mine before adding to the mix. I think I used maybe 3/4 c of nuts.

Here they are baking in the oven. You can pack them in pretty tight because they don't spread out or rise.

And after they rest for a half a minute on the cooling rack they go onto plates and into tummies while still warm. 

I don't measure for this recipe, but here is an approximation:

1-2 cups oatmeal

2-4 bananas, mushed

Mix the two. It should be stirrable but not drippy runny. Add more of one or the other to get it thick enough that it doesn't spread out when dropped on the pan in a spoonful.

Then add whatever other ingredients you want- spices like cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, nuts or seeds, dried fruit, etc. Mix it all together (I actually end up using my hands but a big sturdy spatula or wooden spoon might work, too).

Drop by spoonfuls on a parchment lined baking sheet and bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes or so, depending on the size you made them. The smaller ones may be ready at 15, and bigger ones need up to 30 minutes. *If you don't use parchment paper, you have to grease the pan or the oatmeal WILL stick.

They do stay a bit chewy and it's almost impossible to over bake them. I haven't tried it but these would likely do well as dehydrated cookies, too, so you could keep them raw if you wanted to. Great work-out food or on-the-go breakfast.

Super mega healthy breakfast that kids enjoy because it has the word 'cookie' in the name, looks like a cookie, smells like a cookie and tastes like a cookie. So cookies win! Woo-hoo!

July 4th Craft

The kids made mini flags to celebrate the 4th of July this week. How cute are they?!!

Our Magical Adventures Begin- Gnomes

Welcome to your new home, little rainbow gnomies!

Making Pizza

Last week we made pizza dough for our bread. The kids had lots of fun dressing the pizza. I didn't get pictures for the later stages because we moved inside to finish and I was too busy helping keep the ingredients flowing. 

In addition to our pizza sauce and cheese, we added some spinach and diced tomatoes, plus sprinkled on some ground flax, chopped parsley, and kelp. And of course there was nothing leftover.They loved every bite! 

A Welcomed Garden Share

The deliriously sweet and lovely Laura, Brooklyn's mom, brought us some fresh garden spinach yesterday to share with the kids. Thank you, Laura!! 

With one of the two fresh pineapples I picked up the day before, I decided to make nu-licious (nutritious and delicious) spinach smoothies for the kids today.

It was a perfect treat this morning and the kids luuuuved them! They even asked for more.

Adding Magic People and Accessories

This week the kids asked me for play wands. They have been using the wooden spoons from the play kitchen to flourish about while saying 'Abracadabra!". 

The wands were already in the works, along with other magic elements so I was pleased to hear the kids ask for them. I purchased the materials for the wands a couple of weeks ago and I hope to get those done by the weekend. 

Also started this week is our gnome family. Later I'll add a gnome house, and then wizard hats possibly to go with the wands. 

After the gnomes and wands, I have plans to make superhero capes in rainbow colors, enough so each child has one cape if they want, plus matching masks. This will all be added in the next few weeks to enrich our dramatic play materials. 

Here is the first gnome we made today. This was my test gnome, actually, to figure out what pattern I wanted to settle on, so I used a color I didn't care about to start with knowing I'd need to do some trial and error. I planned to make rainbow gnomes, and this guy is more a forest green, so maybe he'll end up being part of a woodland gnome set, instead of the rainbow gnomes in brighter colors. :-)  

I had not planned to do anything decorative for this one since he was my test subject, but I decided to add a rough blanket stitch and some embroidery accents to liven it up a bit and see what it looked like. Not bad I think!

The gnome is so cute and I can't wait to add the rest, though for the first rainbow set I want them very simple and later as we add more I'll dress them up a bit more.  

Mother's Day Gifts

Gift wrapped mysteries for moms, the kids made these sweet gifts for Mother's Day this Sunday.