Lunch: Mac & Cheese, Snowman Pancakes, Candy Cane

Mac & Cheese:

I had to dress-up the leftover Panera Bread mac & cheese, so I added some rainbow non-pariels sprinkles - adding sprinkles dresses up just about anything!

Cut up Strawberries

Dried Cranberries and yogurt covered raisins

I used a Sharpie to draw a Christmas tree on a banana.  The kid REALLY likes when I draw on her bananas...

Snowman Pancakes:

Used cookie cutters to make a couple of snowman pancakes (I don't recommend this!  I used a TON of cooking spray and they still stuck!)  with faces, hat, and buttons added with white frosting - make sure they are COMPLETELY cool before adding frosting or it WILL melt!  Snowmen are hanging out in the "snow":  mini marshmallows and yogurt covered raisins.

Snowmen shaped carrots in some ranch dressing.

Fruit: Snowmen and star cut out of apple pieces and some green grapes.

Cookie Topped Sandwich:

Plain 'ole peanut butter and jelly cut into squares with a frosted sugar cookie with LOTS of red sprinkles on top.

Vanilla yogurt with tree shaped sprinkles.

Snowmen shaped Cheese out of mozzarella sticks and cheddar cheese block.

Happy Creating!

Lunches: Snowman, Gingerbread Man/Woman, Christmas Trees

Snowman Lunch:

Melted Cheese on an english muffin.  Chocolate frosting for eyes and mouth, carrot nose (this would have been better with a bagel, but we were out!)

Carrot sticks (my kid doesn't usually eat this, but occasionally 3 - 4 will get eaten!)

Cored and peeled apple (with the side cut off b/c that's the only way i could get it to fit in the space!)

Vanilla yogurt with mini chocolate chip eyes and mouth and carrot nose.

Gingerbread Man and Woman Lunch:

Turkey and Cheese cut out with a gingerbread man (buttons are mini chocolate chips, mouth is black frosting and eyes are white wafers for decorating) and gingerbread girl (buttons are bunny wafers).  Cut out using cookie cutters (similar to these) 

Fresh Fruit:  green grapes and pineapple

Carrot sticks with a bit of ranch dressing on the bottom

Christmas Trees:

Peanut Butter and honey sandwich trees cut from Christmas Tree cookie cutters.  Topped with fruit roll up stars (mini cookie cutters).

Little snowmen made from ⅓ of mozzarella cheese stick, pretzel arms, faces drawn with edible marker.

Pineapple chunks

Happy Creating!

Hand Glittered Photo Gift Tags

Not sure if you know this, but 4 year olds can't read :)

Which works out nice when you are passing notes to your husband or telling her something is on the grocery list when it really isn't.  

But at Christmas, when she wants to help pass out presents?  Not so great. 

So I thought it would be nice to put gift tags on presents that my little girl can "read":

Photos!  and to help with the reading thing, I added each person's initial.  

Which, let's be realistic, no one is going to be having a school lesson on Christmas morning.  But, she had been watching me make these over a couple of days and we talked about each picture, the sound their name makes and the letter it starts with.  So I guess that's something.

The very cute "Merry Christmas" portrait tags came from TheTomKatStudio.  I changed it a little bit b/c the bottom of their template says 'From our Family to Yours' and I wanted it to say from 'The M Family' instead. They also have a Happy New Year one that doesn't say anything else on it, so you could always write your name under that.  The inital tags were a template I found on the internet, but for the life of me, I can't find it anywhere.  If you know where it is, let me know?

I started adding glitter around the pictures with glue and Martha Stewart Course Glitter (which is AMAZING, btw!) but my templates had black lines around it for the photos; I didn't make my photos big enough to cover the lines, and the glitter wasn't dark enough to cover it up.  

I found some glitter glue at Wal-mart for 88 cents! (we got these for Christmas and the jumbo size is pretty awesome!)  I got red and silver to go along with the Martha Stewart Crystal and regular green glitter I had at home.  I added the green and crystal glitter to the red and silver glues to give some of the tags two colors :)

My in-laws only open one present at a time and don't hand them all out first, so the gift tags didn't really help the 4 year old :(

But Santa had also left some presents under our tree at home and he even used some of my tags!!  So when we got home, she was able to pass the presents out to our family of 4 before we sat down to open them...It all worked out in the end!

I'll definitely be making more of these next year :)

Happy Creating!