Muffin Tin Meal: birds nest snack

Yes, I know, it's Wed.  But to be honest this is the first moment all week I've given my poor blog any thought other than "Oh I should snap a pic of that to put on my blog."  What's even more ridiculous is we did this muffin tin activity LAST week so there's really no excuse. hehehe  Last week my younger boys were working with the letter N.  So we made yummy chocolate birds nests.  Great timing too because peeps were on sale for 50% off.  You know me, I love a sale.

Without further ado:

 I gathered the supplies near the microwave.  Melted the chocolate chips in a bowl in the microwave.  I sprayed the pans while they melted.

 Colton used his giant boy muscles to stir in the chow mein noodles.

 Then (and obviously I don't have a picture of this part) we took spoons and spooned the chocolate chow mein mix into our muffin tin cups.

 Then we added little whopper eggs and peeps chicks to our nests.

 They turned out really cute and colorful and the kids loved the project.

So you should totally try this easy and fun snack if you're ever doing a birds or nest unit.  It was a little messy.  You should've seen Sierra, she was pretty well covered in chocolate.  And I may or may not have given her some straight up whoppers and peeps to keep her little hands out of our trays while we worked.  I'll never tell.  I will tell you though that I'm linking this up once again with Muffin tin Mom so go check out all the other great muffin tins this week!

Muffin tin Monday: going green

So it's April.  Which apparently sparks lots of "save the earth" and "go green" campaigns.  I have a green muffin tin lunch to share.  But I have a confession to make.  We actually had this muffin tin meal in honor of St. Patrick's day back in March.  BUT blogger wasn't working for me so I didn't get to post it.  So let's all pretend that it's in honor of "earth day" and "going green".  Mmkay?  Great!

So I served green pasta.  Now a mother who cares about ultimate health and nutrition would've gone and bought spinach pasta.  I just added green food coloring to the boiling water with the pasta.  I served it with a bit of butter and cheese.  I also added green food coloring to their milk and cottage cheese.  I served naturally green broccoli and grapes though.  It was a while ago now but I'm pretty sure it was a hit.  Check back next week to see the fun "nest" snack we're going to make in the muffin tins.

As always I'm linking up with the Muffin Tin Mom for Muffin tin Monday so head over and check out the other great tins this week.

Muffin Tin: Valentine's Edition

Ok so Valentine's is a Tuesday this year.  I'm not a morning person.  My husband leaves for work by 7am.  I made our Valentine muffin tin meal for breakfast Saturday morning.  And without further ado here are the pictures:

Heart shaped pancakes, a small pink flower cup of syrup for dipping, vanilla yogurt with red sprinkles, and banana slices with a heart pick for eating.

Sawyer was pretty excited about it.

This is the special plate size heart shaped pancake I made for KOJ.

The pancakes were strawberry flavored.  I was hoping that the strawberries would give them a good pink color but really they were kinda sickly looking so I added some neon pink food coloring to give the pink a decent boost.

Today we'll be making heart shaped cookies for KOJ to take to his friends at work tomorrow.  We're not huge v-day celebrators here but I figure a fun activity or two never hurt anyone right?

As always I'm linking up to Muffin Tin Monday so head over and check out the other great tins this week!  I've also linked up with Bento of the Week's valentine meme so check out all those other great meals this week too!  And I linked up with the Thematic Thursday meme - the theme being Valentine's day so go check out all the other great Valentine's day activities people have posted about in blogland.

Muffin Tin Monday: Stopping by the woods on a Snowy Evening

This week in school we're reading Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost. In that vein I made a Snowy Woods tin.

marshmallow snowballs, ranch dip icy pond, snowy mound of cottage cheese, fallen branches pretzels, and broccoli trees with parmesan cheese snow.

Princess loved using the "trees" to eat the "pond" lol

The tin was a hit over all!

It's always interesting trying to theme our tin to match what we're doing in school. Thankfully we're always doing a couple of things so I always have something fun to choose from.

As usual I'm linking up with other Muffin Tin moms so go check out the other great tins this week!

Muffin Tin Monday: Flavors of Fall snack

Well it's Monday again.  And I have a muffin tin to share, shocker I know.  So last week we did a flavors of fall snack tin.

I served milk, pumpkin dip (homemade from fresh pumpkin) with chocolate animal crackers for dipping, roasted pumpkin seeds, and homemade applesauce.  Can't get much more fall flavor than apples and pumpkins right?  I wanted to serve apple juice or cider but the tin was last minute and we didn't have any in the house.

 As usual I'm linking with muffin tin mom so go check out the other great tins!

Muffin Tin Monday - the Letter M

Last week in our school the letter of the week was M.  So come Friday I had gotten some M foods ready for consumption.  Most of them were things the kids normally eat but there was one new food item in our tins.

Mango, mushrooms, macaroni, muenster cheese, and milk!

All three trays together.

Baby girl didn't get a tin but she had the same yummy food for dinner!

The boys eating their dinner with all of our FIAR stuff still scattered about the table. lol

So the mango was a new food for the kids.  They're usually really great about liking different fruits but this time only Squirrel seemed eager to go at it.  From the kitchen, I heard him coaching Howler to give it a try, that it was really yummy.  Which just cracked me up.  Then I hear Howler exclaim "It tastes like a (something else another fruit that is actually closely related but the name of which I am having a difficult time remembering at this very moment.)"  He must have only eaten that one bite though because at the end of the night that spot was still full of mano.  The other two ate all of theirs gone.  Actually so did the Princess come to think of it.  Spider didn't eat very much but he made that mango disappear.

Check out the rest of the muffin tin meals by clicking on the button!

Muffin Tin Monday returns!

It's back to school day for us today and in celebration I brought back our Muffin Tin meals!  Today we had a breakfast muffin tin and I'm glad we did because it took me nearly an hour to make the food and put it all together.  Eek.  So here it is:

 Letters, and shapes cut out of sweet potato pancakes, numbers cut out of egg, and bacon made into an = sign and in the tins below a + sign.  The banana circles, frog filled with syrup, and the last three have the scraps from the pancakes and eggs.  The kids pretty much devoured it so at least it didn't go to waste.

 Yum!

Even Princess girl chowed down on some pancakes, eggs, and bacon.  She ate her banana while I cooked.

And that is our Back to School Muffin Tin.  Head over to Muffin Tin Mom and check out the other great Muffin Tins today!

Muffin Tin Monday: Freedom rings

Happy Independence Day!

Today for our muffin tin Monday we did lunch because well I needed time to actually prep these tins today.

White star shaped marshmallows with blueberries and blue tinted cottage cheese for the blue/star portion of the flag.  Mozzarella cheese makes the top stripes, strawberries make the middle stripe, and banana slices and turkey lunch meat makes the bottom stripe.

It was met with great success:

Now I will say that cottage cheese was a last minute add in.  There were supposed to have been two things of blueberries in the fridge but the kids got into them before I got up in the morning over the last few days and there were a small handful left.  So I improvised.  Thankfully my kids love cottage cheese, it is a truly white food so the blue food coloring didn't tinge it green instead, and I had some in the fridge (because it's not something that I have stocked regularly).

As always I'm linking up with Muffin Tin Mom so be sure to click the link and check out all the other great patriotic muffin tins today!  And have a safe and happy holiday!

Muffin Tin Monday: breakfast... again

So I managed to get our breakfast around into our muffin tins again.  YAY!  Nothing spectacular and it's food we would regularly eat for breakfast too.  Go figure.

Raisins, toast with jelly, and scrambled eggs

They enjoyed it.  And another muffin tin meal was met with great success.

Check out the other Muffin tin Meals today!  And check back next week to see our Red, white, and Blue muffin tin in honor of the fourth of July!

31 days update and today's Muffin Tin Monday

Ok I'll start with the Muffin Tin Monday since I know most of today's traffic will likely come from linking up to that.  Today I did breakfast again.  It's easier for me to put something together for breakfast and then I'm not rushing trying to get something cute together for lunch.  Since the kids tend to leave me be while I prep breakfast but not so much when I'm prepping lunch.  So here's the scoop on our MTM breakfast.

plain oatmeal in the bowl, banana slices, brown sugar and raisins for the oatmeal, and blueberries.

Even Princess got in on the muffin tin action today.  She got a few blueberries and some banana slices.

Squirrel monkey mixed his sugar and raisins right into his oatmeal.  He ate every bite.

Not sure what Spider is doing here but I think he put the wrong thing in his oatmeal. lol 

And alas I did NOT get a pic of Howler with his meal as he was away from the table when I was snapping the pics.

So remember I'm linking up here at Muffin Tin Monday so go check out the other great muffin tin meals today.

Moving on.  31 days to clean challenge.  So, we have completely week one.  I'm having a hard time getting the cleaning challenges done at the "right" time of day according to my perception of the way this is supposed to work but I'm working hard and getting them done as I can throughout each day.  Last week I started out with the kitchen as the challenge says.  This is what my kitchen looked like before:

So then I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned.  I spent a while cleaning probably two or so hours but that included washing all the larger pots and pans and whatever didn't fit into the dishwasher.  And I got this:

Not too shabby right?  Yeah I didn't think so either.  I was very pleased with my clean kitchen.  I really went at it.  Cleaning things up that I'd ignored for too long.  Things behind the sink, on the windowsill etc.

The next challenge was to clean a hot spot in the kitchen.  I chose this shelf:

And after spending probably 20-30 minutes on it I came out with this:

No I moved the storage bins down onto the wire shelf on the bottom so I could more easily reach them and moved the raisins and snacky stuff up to the top shelf.  So far it is staying in nice condition.

So we're supposed to be getting into the routine of picking up the kitchen each morning after breakfast and tidying our main spaces.  I don't have pics of tidying the main spaces.  Sorry ya'll, cause that was a dramatic change and it took me and the boys about an hour to accomplish the other day for the initial clean up.  And on Friday's we add cleaning the bathroom to the routine.  Right now I'm very glad we only have one bathroom.  On Saturdays we add preparing our meals for Sunday to our schedule so that we can have a complete day of rest.  What does that look like?  The day of rest?  Well I'm so glad you asked let me show you:

Now keep in mind we were super busy this weekend so we didn't have much time for keeping up after ourselves on Sat so this is actually the accumulation of two days of not cleaning in the kitchen not just the one.  So I started out with 20 min on the timer this morning.  Then I got distracted and did some switching over of the laundry and such during that time so after probably 10 -15 min this is what the kitchen looked like:

After a walk to the library and returning home and resting for a few minutes I got to work finishing up the kitchen and it turned out like this:

Took me maybe another 30-40 min including washing by hand the accumulation of larger bowls and pans and what wouldn't fit into the dishwasher again.  Not too shabby.  And it feels so nice to look into my nice clean kitchen.

Today I'm supposed to clean a bedroom and wash the laundry from that room.  I'll do the boys room because their sheets need washed anyway. Then tomorrow it will be adding our room to the rotation.  I'm also supposed to be aiming to do a load of laundry each day.  I have already done that today and will add a load of sheets to today's tasks.  After reviewing the calendar and aside from Monday's when I'll need extra time to catch back up from taking Sunday's off I really don't think this "routine" should take me more than an hour of maintenance cleaning each morning and then just picking up after ourselves throughout the rest of the day.  I will also be adding a children's chore system to the foray as called for by the "Next Thing" on Thursday.  I've already started it but I'll get it finished and star using it this week.

Anyway, so far I like the challenge.  More than the prescribed tasks though it's knowing that others are out there working hard keeping their homes tidy too.  Check out the facebook page and join one of more of the challenge groups to feel more connected to others that are on this same journey with us.  I do highly recommend this as a jump start to getting your home in order and finding a way to keep it that way.