Archive for the ‘Easter’ Category

We try to eat healthy, and during Easter it’s hard with all the candy everywhere!  I adore candy and my pregnant will power is um… not really strong. So when I decided to make some fun treats I wanted at least one of them to be truly healthy!  The other could be if I had made it from scratch but I didn’t- but you can !  Either way they are both super simple and very very tasty!

Carrot Cupcakes

1. Gather your materials. Grab your favorite carrot cake and cream cheese icing recipes or boxed mix and a tub of icing, orange and green jelly bellys .  I should note that although I did use a mix I also mixed in 1/4 cup of crushed pineapple and it was very very yummy.
2. Bake and cool your cupcakes.
3. Ice them and add your jelly beans in the shape of a carrot!
4. Eat more than you care to admit and send the rest to your husband’s office.

Frozen Yogurt Eggs

1. Gather your materials. You will need a silicone mini cake pan ( they still have Easter themed ones at both Target and Walmart in my area), a blender,  low fat vanilla yogurt, and frozen or fresh fruit of your choice. 
2. Pop 2 scoops of the yogurt in ( about 3/4 cup) and 1/2 – 3/4 cups of the fruit.
3. Blend
4. Pour 
5. Freeze ( we froze ours for 2 hours and they were perfect- formed but not rock hard.) If you freeze them longer just let them thaw for 30 minutes  in your fridge before serving them so they are soft enough to eat with a spoon. 
6. Pop out of the mold and enjoy !  These were a huge hit with my son. 

I had no clue if this was going to work but when I saw that these reinforcements and stationary stickers were on clearance I took it as a sign. I had to t least try and find out. In the end it sort of worked, we had fun, I have blue fingers and hours after the fat only one egg  has been cracked and subsequently eaten.

1. Gather your materials. You will need some cooled hard boiled eggs, paper to protect your table ( we have some cardboard under the newspaper, stationary stickers, dye and a dye hook.  I caved and grabbed the commercial dye , I swore I was going to go au natural this year but exhaustion got the better of me.  Here is a wonderful post from Crunchy Domestic Goddess about how to dye them naturally, I bookmarked it intending to use it. 
2. Get everything prepped before inviting the kiddo to the table- dye is not something you want “help” with.
3. Add your stickers. These reinforcements worked ok, but were really hard to get off once dry.
4. This lace pattern was my favorite.
5. My son wanted to make a happy face ( this was the egg that broke and turned into part of his lunch).
6. The circle stickers were much easier to take off.
7. Dye your eggs.
8. Add in a color mixing lesson too! We added the blue to this pink after to make purple.
9. Let dry and remove the stickers. Some came off easily, some did not.

Want more Easter Crafts?
Here are a few of my favorites from the past!

Fragile Egg

Bunny Ears

Hard and Soft Easter Egg

Collage Carrot

Find every one of our  Easter crafts old and new here

Carrot C

I am always trying to find activities that can be part of a holiday we celebrate but aren’t so targeted that readers who do not celebrate it can’t use it either today or another time in the year. So this Letter C craft was born, carrots can be part of a unit on gardening, healthy eating or for us something we make in preparation for the Easter bunny.

1. Gather your materials. You will need some cardboard ( paper will do but cardboard just makes it more substantial), a marker, a small dish, scissors,  3 or more green pipe cleaners, a sponge, hole punch,  orange paint,  a sheet of construction paper and glue  if you are going to display it.  Ours is resting on the blue paper in the picture but we didn’t glue it on, it’s part of our Easter craft mish mash on our table!
2. Start by writing a C on the cardboard, I tried to make mine thicker at the top and thinner at the bottom to make it resemble a carrot.
3. Pour some orange paint into a dish.
4. Paint! My son loves this glass sponge and how it paints. I love that the sponges make the paint go thinner which makes it dry faster.
5. Let it dry, cut out.
6. Punch 3 holes in the top. My son was able to do this with help, the cardboard was too thick for his hand strength to do it alone.
7. Chase your son around the kitchen when he runs off with the pipe cleaners pretending to conduct an orchestra. Try to decide if it’s brilliant or if you are just too tired and frustrated ( and pregnant) to indulge him when he says” No mama you need to play the Bassoon, I’ll be the trombone!” give in for a bit then consider bribing him with Easter candy just as he decides to come back on his own. Thread the pipe cleaners through the holes.
8. Twist together.
9. If you are gluing to the paper add glue to the back of the carrot , press onto the paper and let dry.

Want even more letter of the week crafts?
Check out my eBook Alphabet Crafts , it’s filled with letter of the week crafts from A-Z including 5 exclusive never before seen crafts !

Books

Coco The Carrot by Steven Salerno is an absurd tale of adventure, and I loved it. Coco is a carrot who dreams of a life larger than the vegetable drawer . She dreams big and goes for it. Unlike most carrots that end up in stew she becomes a famous hat designer and is the toast of Paris with her Monkey companion Anton. If you are scratching your head but oddly intrigued you will like this book. It was long but my son sat with me giggling and telling me ” Carrots can’t do that?!” more than once. I loved it because it is so absurd that she is a carrot, but the story itself is about going for your dreams, hitting bumps in the road and realizing that your dreams shift and change and that’s ok.  There is great bits of humor for the adults as well, something I always appreciate!

A Very Big Bunny by Marisabina Russo is a nice book about 2 bunnies that don’t fit in at school.  This book opened a good dialogue between my son and I as we were reading about how both the tallest and the shortest bunny in the class got picked on.  The students in their class were mean but not purposefully bullying, they excluded these bunnies because they simply didn’t fit. The part that hit me the most was when the teacher lined the kids up by height, and Amelia the tall bunny was always last. It just made me think of how adults so often single kids out without trying to be terrible, but really hurting them. All that aside, the book itself comes to a nice conclusion and I think it’s worth grabbing for any child tall or short!

Carrot Soup by John Segal is a cute book about planting a garden, in this case carrots, tending it and then reaping the rewards…. or maybe not. Rabbit carefully planned out his garden, took care of it but when it was time to gather all the carrots they were all gone!  Throughout the pages there are hints to where the carrots might be, your child will likely figure it out before Rabbit does. My son liked this book and I loved reading it with him as he was rather exasperated that the Rabbit couldn’t figure out the mystery!

You May Also Like:

Collage Carrot
Caterpillar C
C is for Cookie

Going to the grocery store while pregnant can be dangerous, I left the store yesterday not with 1 but 2 bags of mini marshmallows.  Buyers regret stepped in but then I thought I could make a fun Easter craft with them too. So glad I got both bags because my son loved this and I think the Easter egg is adorable. Whenever I do crafts with tempting treats like marshmallows I give my son a number he needs to add to it before he can pop one in his mouth! So we limit gorging and practice counting.

1. Gather your materials. You will need some white and colored mini marshmallows, construction paper, glue and a marker.
2. Start by drawing an Easter egg on your paper.
3. Add glue along the line.
4. Add your white marshmallows along the edge. We did 15 then ate one, 21 then ate one , and 17 and ate one. Yes I did help too. My son said ” Mommy I will share my activity with you and tell daddy we shared.” 
5. Next ask your child how many stripes they want. I caution you perhaps give them a range, my son said 8 and wouldn’t budge. I ended up doing 3 rows because 8 is a lot for a 3 year old to do.
6. Add your colored marshmallows. We decided to add a sorting element by saying the lines can be any color, but it must be all one color. So my son was forced to sort the colors when adding them. Worked great! With younger toddlers I’d just let them go for it. Older children can add a patterning lesson in too.
7. Keep going!
8. Let dry.

I want to know YOUR favorite Easter books!

Leave a short review of your favorite Easter book in the comments and I will feature it ( and a link to you) in a reader’s favorites section of an upcoming  post.

Painting on toast and even rice cakes have been featured on two of my favorite blogs Make and Takes and Mom Tried It but I had never tried the fun craft until today. My son only wants one thing for breakfast these days, waffles. When I was looking at them today I thought, I wonder if I could paint on them too?  Oh and if I used a cookie cutter they could be Easter eggs! It was such a hit we used up all our waffles.

1. Gather your materials. You will need some food coloring, milk, a paint brush, waffles ( lightly toasted), and an Easter egg cookie cutter.
2. Mix your food coloring with a splash of milk, you don’t need much!
3. Cut the waffle into the shape of the egg.
4. Start painting. 
5. I made stripes. My son was more free form.
6. Toast and serve!
7. Eat.
8. I have to show you what a hit this was, after he ate the first two he made a third – and ate it too.  My kid doesn’t eat that much, this was a feast for him!

Egg Books

The Golden Egg Book by Margaret Wise Brown is one of those books I have clear memories of from childhood. Thing is I don’t really remember the story so much as the cover. In this case it’s ok to judge a book by it’s cover because although the ending has always seemed tacked on to me I enjoyed this simple and cute book about a bunny and the egg that he finds. My son liked it too, although he was much more into the illustrations of butterflies in the first and last few pages.

First the Egg by Laura Vaccaro Seeger is the perfect book to introduce life cycles to young kids. It doesn’t go into great detail, but it doesn’t have to it is perfectly effective just the way it is. Each page shows one stage like a seed and the following the result of a flower. My son loved this book and I think older children would too, it’s simple but isn’t infantile. I think the Easter bunny may be bringing this to our house for keeps in a few weeks!