Welcome Jack Frost!

This morning I looked out my window to find my neighbourhood shimmering with frost - NOW it feels like winter.  So I made a wintery lunch for Pickle:

Snowflake peanut butter sandwiches, powdered suger donut hole snowballs, and vanilla yogurt.  I don't usually have donut holes, so that was just lucky coincidence; I bought them specially to make a treat.

Bella got a muffin cup meal. I had already made it the night before, otherwise I would have made her something frost-inspired too - but I don't think she'll be disappointed with this :) 

Mini bell peppers (bells are Christmassy), a snowflake frosted oatmeal muffin (she did get some frost after all),  Christmas tree cheese quesadilla bites (on spinach tortillas), celery and grape tomato holly, and a star cheddar cheese stack. A festive bunch of her favourites!

This is why I got the donut holes. Sweet Snowmen!

I can't take credit for the idea though, I think it was in Family Fun magazine. 

Anyways, I used donut holes for mine instead of mini donuts, carrot slivers instead of candy corn, and bits of licorice instead of frosting - but same idea. I also made Santa hats with strawberries, leftover cookie frosting, and a couple of the oatmeal mini-muffins, and put them together with the snowmen to make a fun & festive snack for my two smallest sproutlets to enjoy after I dragged them around on errands this morning:

Aren't these little Santa hat strawberry topped muffin treats adorable! I saw them done with brownies by Lunchboxes with Love, but since I had muffins made I thought they'd do just as well:

 Happy Friday everyone, have a great weekend!

Oooh,  I almost forgot, the reason I decided to make the snowmen donut treats this week! For Read.Explore.Learn.! I've been reading the small sproutlets "Snowmen At Night" by Caralyn & Mark Buehner.

It's such a cute book! The illustrations are lovely, and the kids laugh at the snowman shenanigans. The last verse of the book is the greatest though:

"So if your snowman's grin is crooked,

or he's lost a little height,

you'll know he's just been doing

what snowmen do at night!"

Thank you, Snowmen At Night, for making it easier for me to smooth over the discovery of a snowman not as my children left him :)

There's also some learning fun hidden in the book, secret shapes that have been painted into each scene... like Santa's face in the snow, a T-Rex in the moon... the girls had fun searching for them, and now they race to be the first to point them out when we turn the page :)

Thank you to Pickle's 1st grade teacher Mrs. Nickerson,

he received this book as a Christmas gift from her!