This fun breakfast is quickly becoming a Halloween tradition in our house. G loves spiderweb pancakes because they’re ‘really cool and spooky’ and I like them because they make for a fun, but healthy way to start the day. Plus despite how it may look, they’re really easy to make.
Tag Archives: halloween
Mummy String Cheese
Turning jars, juice boxes, and chocolate bars into mummies for Halloween is certainly nothing new, but I think it’s an adorable idea. So in my quest to pull together fun and sugar-free Halloween treats for Miss G, I decided to make some mummy string cheese to add into the mix. String cheese itself is a huge treat in our house because we never buy it, but I think these little mummies will be even more fun for Grae.
Franken-SLIME Halloween Favours
After yesterday, I decided that Miss G and I needed a very low-key day around the house today. We spent our morning making these cute little Franken-SLIME Halloween favours, and we both just love the way they turned out.
With Gracen being a sugar-free kid, I try my very best to make sure that she doesn’t miss out or feel resentful about the fact that we don’t let her eat junk. So in addition to making sure she has yummy {healthier} treats for the Halloween parties we’re attending, I wanted to make sure we had something fun and sugar-free that she could hand out to her friends and fellow trick-or-treaters. Now while we’ve done sparkly slime treats for Halloween and Valen-SLIME treats for Valentine’s Day, slime is so much fun that we couldn’t resist doing it again. Only this time we switched things up a little and turned the favours into little Frankestein heads!
A Spooky Bug Swamp
A bin of green oobleck and a handful of creepy crawlers = messy Halloween-inspired fun for the kids in the courtyard. The bugs slowly sunk into the oobleck and disappeared in the sticky swamp, so retrieving them was great fun.
Halloween Footprint Bunting
A couple of mornings ago during breakfast, Miss G turned to me with the sparkle in her eyes that means she’s got a brilliant new idea bubbling, and said, ‘Mama, I have an idea… We should decorate our whole apartment with Halloween stuff! Like ghosts and bats and jack-o-lanterns and all that spooky stuff.’ I agreed and got to thinking about all of the fun holiday items and decorations we had to leave in Canada when moving to the Middle East.
{Halloween-themed} Sensory Play On the Go
With an expat moms breakfast 30 to 45 minutes away on tap for early this morning, I wanted to be as organized as possible last night. I prepped the usual – stainless bottles full of water and a couple of healthy snacks – then went in search of something that Gracen could quietly play with while I chatted with some of the other moms. Lately, her new unifix cubes have been keeping her incredibly engaged and happy during meals out and over at friends’ houses, but I also don’t want them to lose their magic. ☺ While digging through our craft shelf, I came across some slime I brought from back home. (Yes, I brought homemade slime from Canada… I don’t know what that says about me, and I’m not sure I want to know either…) I packed it in one of my favourite interlocking containers from Daiso and then went in search of a couple of things to pair it with. The result was this little sensory play to go kit, which Gracen just loved.
Pumpkin Seed Counting Game
I’ve been a long time fan of No Time for Flashcards, so when Allison, the author, announced that her very first post was live on Adventures in Learning (the new PBS Parents blog), I headed on over to check it out. As usual, her learning activity was creatively set up, engaging as could be, and easy to put together. While we really haven’t started doing activities that have specific learning outcomes in mind (we’re more in the play and learn along the way stage), Gracen does love counting and all sorts of games, so I decided we’d give it a shot.
Toddler Food: What Miss G Eats {23: Halloween Edition}
Whether it’s Valentine’s Day, St. Patricks Day, or Halloween, one of the things I love most about holidays is preparing special themed meals and snacks for our little lady. Here is some Halloween-inspired food she enjoyed this year…
Breakfast // Wholewheat flax spiderweb pancakes. (Just put your pancake batter into a squeeze bottle, use it to draw an asterisk, then connect the points with swooped lines.)
Snack // Jack-o-lantern oranges. (G seriously couldn’t get enough of these. Simply draw a face on a room temperature orange with black Sharpie. I did mine just before giving them to her – I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I’m not especially keen on the possibility of the marker fumes seeping through the peel.)
Lunch // {A slightly scary-looking} Jack-o-lantern quesadilla. (Just 2 red or orange tortilla shells cut by hand – think kitchen scissors – some cheese, black beans, and veggies.)
Snack // Home roasted pumpkin seeds.
Dinner // Roasted pumpkin soup with goat cheese, fresh parsley, and a grilled cheese on the side. (Not overly Halloween-ish, but you see what I’m going for, right?)
♥
Pumpkin Seed Sorting
This little activity just came about organically. Gracen and I were scooping out the insides of a pumpkin and she began collecting all of the seeds and carefully placing them in a neat pile off to the side.
A couple of bowls, some “tools”, and a tray later, and she had herself her very own sorting station.
Though she could have collected the seeds much more quickly using her hands, she really liked the challenge of getting underneath the slippery little seeds and scooping them up into her spoons. Great sensory play and fine motor skill development all in one {totally unplanned} activity? Yes please.
She even took the fun one step further and sampled a raw, goop-covered seed. She slowly nodded her head and said, “Mmmmm… Yummy”, but her little scrunched nose and furrowed brow told me she felt otherwise. ☺
♥
Trick-or-Treating
Though we were hopeful, the rain didn’t let up in the least for Gracen’s very first time trick-or-treating… In fact, come dark, it was pouring down so hard that the rain was hitting the asphalt and then bouncing back up at us. While not ideal for trick-or-treating, what are you going to do? We layered up our little fox, grabbed our umbrellas, and headed out with the goal of visiting at least a handful of houses.
After stopping by Uncle Brett’s house for a quick visit, we made our way down his street. Grae was so excited, and within a couple of houses, she had the knock, “trick-or-treat”, and “thank you!” down pat.
After carefully making her way down the steps, she’d squeal, “Different house! Different house! Yook for yights… Yook for punkins!!!”
Then she’d quickly find another and shout, “Go to dis house!” The girl was into it.
After looping around, visiting the houses on the other side of the street, and making our way back to our car, we headed back to our neighbourhood. By then, the rain had lightened up quite a lot, so we headed into the backyard to light some sparklers.
I’m not sure where I originally saw it, but I remember seeing someone using a plastic cup as a sparkler shield during 4th of July festivities with their kiddos. Brilliant, really. Before heading out I had cut a tiny ‘x’ on the bottom of an extra party cup we had from Gracen’s birthday party, so all we had to do was poke our extra long sparklers through just a bit, and light them.
It worked like a charm.
And since I only poked them through a little bit, the part Gracen was hanging onto didn’t get hot at all.
Gracen happily held on until the sparklers were about half way down, then she’d pass them to one of us, and ask for a new one.
Before heading in, we quickly snapped a couple of shots of Gracen and I, because although we always have a ton of photos of Grae and Bradley together, pictures of Mama and Grae are few and far between. (Sadly, by this point I was soaking wet falling apart mess, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.)
Inside, Gracen dumped out all of the treats she’d collected. Can you tell we had infused them with an equal amount of healthier “treats”? Haha! Who says people don’t hand out stamps, stickers, pretzels, seeds, crackers, organic fruit leather, and organic yogurt-covered raisins (a HUGE treat in our house)? ☺
Grae then sorted the piles into a “Gracen pile” and a “Mama/Papa pile”, giving us all of the delicious, but terrible for you chocolate and candy, and happily giving herself all of the ‘Mama approved’ treats (that’s our girl!)
Have you ever seen a child so excited for freeze-dried strawberries when there’s a plethora of chocolate bars, chips, and cheezies in front of her?
The night ended with a treat feast, a glow-in-the-dark bubble bath, and a tired little lady falling asleep to the sound of fireworks filling our neighbourhood.
♥
A Halloween Visit to Papa’s School
It’s been a busy day for us so far… After an early morning visit to SweetSalt Baked Goods & Playscapes for coffee, fresh bread, and ghost cookies made with organic flour and pumpkin, and a Halloween celebration at Strong Start, we headed to Bradley’s school for a little visit.
Gracen was so excited to visit her Papa and show him the treat bag she’d made at school and even more excited to go from one classroom to the next, popping in to say hello to all of the lovely teachers.
What she wasn’t excited about, however, was leaving without Papa in tow. Poor little lady cried her most pitiful cry and ran back to Papa twice after already saying goodbye and escaping Mama’s grasp. ☹
♥
Happy Halloween!
Painted Polka-Dotted Pumpkin
Last year, we all carved our pumpkins together. And though Gracen had a blast scooping out pumpkin guck, sorting seeds, and watching the carving action, she didn’t really get to take part in decorating her own pumpkin.
So this year, we decided to switch it up a little. Brad and I still carved our pumpkins, but in order to let Gracen be fully in charge of decorating her very own garden-grown pumpkin, we set her up a little pumpkin painting station.
With a handful of brushes and little containers of purple, green, orange, black, and glow-in-the-dark acrylic paint, Grae got busy beautifying her pumpkin.
It was the best of both worlds, because not only did she get to decorate her pumpkin, but she also got to help us do all of the fun messy parts of carving ours.
After having her fill of icky gunk scooping, it was back to pumpkin painting. She covered the entire thing in a thick layer of paint and then we let it dry overnight.
The next day, we used a little trick I learned years and years ago and cut a hole in the bottom of the pumpkin (no need to mess with trying to get a lit candle in through the top – you simply set your candle down on a surface and place the pumpkin on top). Together, we scooped the insides out and used our apple corer to polka dot the pumpkin’s surface (which worked brilliantly, btw).
Gracen loves it. It glows just like Mama and Papa’s jack-o-lanterns do, and we were able to preserve almost all of her painting masterpiece.
♥
Pink Sparkly Slime Halloween Treats
Bright and early this morning {while still in pajamas}, Gracen and I put together some little Halloween treats for her “yittle dance class fends”. While a little non-traditional, I wanted to make something Gracen-friendly (she hasn’t had refined sugar / junk yet) and call me a downer, but between sweets from family members, school, and trick-or-treating, I think most kids get more than enough junk on Halloween as it is. Our alternative? Mini mason jars filled with sparkly slime. ☺
First off, Miss G helped me collect a few ingredients from around the house… Warm water, Borax, food colouring, glitter, and white glue.
To get us started, she emptied a generous amount of white glue into a large mixing bowl…
Then added some warm water…
A single drop of gel food colouring (she chose pink which isn’t particularly Halloween-ish, but I figure it’s perfect for a group of teeny tiny ballerinas)…
And a liberal amount of glitter.
Then we stirred everything up really well until the mixture was smooth and all of the glue globs had disappeared.
After setting our glue / water mixture aside, we added some Borax to the remaining warm water…
And stirred it well.
Then it was time for the magic! While Gracen gently stirred the glue / water mixture, I slowly began pouring the water / Borax mixture in.
In just seconds, we could see the liquid starting to thicken up and come together in a large mass.
Once everything had been well mixed, I poured out what little excess water was left and Grae began kneading the slime. Before long, the slime was firmer, less sticky, and ready to be packaged.
But not before sneaking in a little play time first though. ☺
Afterwards, we separated our pink sparkly concoction into 12 mini mason jars, which we already had on hand from the individual mason jar cheesecakes we had at Gracen’s recent 2nd birthday party.
With our slime divided into containers, it was off to the computer next. Gracen chose some fluorescent pink paper and the pumpkin clipart, I chose the fonts, and together we came up with these super simple labels.
A little orange marker and a dash of sparkle, and here’s the finished product.
Sparkly Slime (adapted from this recipe)
- 2 cups of white glue
- 1 1/2 cups of hot water
- 1 drop of gel food colouring
- 1 teaspoon of fine glitter
- 1 cup of hot water
- 2 1/2 teaspoons of Borax
Combine the first set of ingredients until the mixture is smooth and free of glue blobs.
In a separate measuring cup / bowl, combine the second set of ingredients until the Borax is dissolved into the water.
Slowly pour the Borax mixture into the glue mixture, stirring as you pour. When the slime comes together in a large mass, pour off the excess water and kneed the slime for a few minutes.
Package in pretty little mason jars and gift to your friends on Halloween.
* One thing to keep in mind is that while clear Elmer’s glue will work just fine for this recipe, the ‘environmentally friendly’ version will not. Trust me. We tried it. TWICE. *
* Also, if you’re wondering about the safety of Borax, this post is extremely helpful. *
♥
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Howl-O-Ween Play Gym
This morning my little brown fox and I headed out to our first official Halloween event – ‘Howl-O-Ween Play Gym’ at our local community centre. Gracen was super excited and happily announced different costumes as she saw them. Her favourite? An ridiculously cute broccoli costume worn by the baby brother of two little girls in her Ballet with Billie class.
Here’s our morning in photos…
Gracen the fox.
Making music.
Jack-o-lantern (quite possibly the trickiest craft ever for wee ones 4 and under!)
Foxes teeter totter too.
Decorating a cookie for Papa.
So spooky.
Costume model.
♥