5 FUN Gifts To Encourage Healthy Eating

Looking for last minute gift ideas? Give the gift of good eating habits with one (or all!) of these five fun ways to encourage healthier eating, a gift that will last beyond the holiday season and for many New Years to come.

1.    Bring some fun & games to the table with

Crunch A Color

Created by a mom, Crunch a Color® is the award-winning healthy eating game that makes mealtime fun! Kids earn points for eating a balanced and colorful plate of veggies, fruits, proteins and grains. Bonus points for trying new foods! Crunch a Color® has been featured by Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, Pottery Barn Kids, Laurie David’s Family Dinner, Kiwi Magazine, Dr. Greene, and Yum Food & Fun For Kids, among many others, as a simple, fun and playful way to make healthy eating fun for the whole family.

Get the table talking! Created by kids for kids, Crunch a Color's award-winning Conversation Starters for Kids are sure to invite giggles and great conversation to your family table. Chock full of curious questions and delightful dilemmas, these 104 conversation starters help kids share their thoughts, grow their ideas, and make mealtime fun!

20% off for Bent on Better Lunches fans with code: bentonbetterlunches

We'll be playing these as a family when Sailor Boy gets home for Christmas Leave! Look for my Review & Giveaway in the New Year!

2. Get your family eating their 5 fruits & veggies a day 
with help from Today I Ate A Rainbow!

The Rainbow Kit from Today I Ate A Rainbow! is a rainbow-themed nutritional chart that encourages your child to "eat a rainbow" every day - a serving of fruit or veg in each of the 5 colours on the chart - and mark them with magnets as they do. It's also much more than a nutritional chart! It's a game, a challenge, an incentive... and it's fun! It even comes with a book!  We love ours - click here to read my review and catch our Rainbow Week!

The Rainbow Kits have recently been revamped! The charts are now a full magnet board that can be hung on a fridge or wall! Only $18.99 and if you buy 2 kits the shipping is free!  www.todayiatearainbow.com

3. Stuff a stocking with one of these adorable fruit & vegetable

Garden Heroes

These cute & cuddly plush beanie characters from Learning ZoneXpress are great incentives for making good eating choices!
Also from Learning ZoneXpress...

4. Inspire kids to help make healthy snacks with LANA's 
Fruit & Vegetable Snack Recipes

 

LANA makes healthy eating fun & easy! LANA cookbooks are spiral-bound with sturdy wipeable laminated pages. Full of the promise of tasty treats & kitchen fun, they're sure to bring a smile to any preschooler's face :)

The LANA (Learning About Nutrition through Activities) Preschool Program website, http://lananutrition.com/ is a wonderful resource for ways to help kids learn about making healthy eating choices through play. They even share FREE downloadable activities & recipes every month!

 

My smaller sproutlets & I have made many of the snacks within our LANA cookbook. Click the pics above to see a couple I've posted about :)

Get FREE shipping between now & Christmas from Learning ZoneXpress with the code BOBL Enter at checkout at http://www.learningzonexpress.com/

5.  Give bigger kids & grown-ups ideas for packing healthy lunches with the  EasyLunchboxes 

Cooking With Trader Joe's Cookbook

This fabulous cookbook is full of recipes contributed by your favourite lunch bloggers (Like me! That's one of mine at the top right, below! Simple & sweet.) It's perfect for anyone who packs a lunch in to school or work - or you could get it for yourself to give your family the gift of better lunches all year! 

Cooking with Trader Joe’s Cookbook: Easy Lunch Boxes is available at bookstores everywhere including Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com.

Also brought to you by EasyLunchboxes, there's a new community for lunch packers - no matter what brand of containers, bags, coolers, or lunch boxes you use! Let's Pack Lunch! is the place to connect with the very people who packed the lunches in the cookbook, and more!

So there you go, a handful of my favourites, and where to find them. There aren't many shopping days left in this holiday season though, so if it's too late to order from the websites, you can still get some of these from Amazon!

Have a Happy & Healthy Holiday!

Making Healthy Snacks with Birdie

Birdie & I made spider snacks from our LANA Fruit & Vegetable Snack Recipes cookbook  :)

The recipe calls for dried apricots, pretzel sticks, & raisins. We modified our spiders a little, since we used the dried white peaches that came in our June NatureBox instead of apricots, and they were quite a bit bigger.

Birdie had fun with the cookbook. It's spiral bound, with thick laminated pages, so I let her play with it. She matched up all her pretzel sticks and raisins to the ones on the recipe page :)

 

At first, Birdie wasn't really interested in following the recipe to make a spider, she just wanted to snack & play. Here she is being silly with the one I made:

When she was ready to make her own, I got her started by poking some holes in the peach with a toothpick - then she filled them with the pretzel sticks. This was a good fine motor and hand-eye coordination activity.

 

She was very careful not to break the pretzels, and so pleased with her (almost) finished creation! Here are our dried peach & pretzels spiders after we added the raisin eyes:

Birdie wasn't done yet though. She picked up another peach and pretzel stick and started doing her own thing. What do you think she was making?

 

She made mushrooms! A plate of peach & pretzel mushrooms :) I love that she used her imagination to create a fun snack of her own! ♥  

We had a good time & made healthy snacks! I definitely recommend LANA's Fruit & Vegetable Snack Recipes cookbook if you're looking for fun & simple healthy snack ideas to make for or with your child. Like this Berry Cute Mice Snack we made a few months ago:

LANA (Learning About Nutrition through Activities) makes nutrition learning fun & easy! The LANA Preschool Program website is a wonderful resource for ways to help kids learn about making healthy eating choices through play. They even share FREE downloadable activities & recipes every month! 

You can Follow LANA on Facebook too :)  

Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored review. I was not asked to write this post nor compensated in any way. I added the above comments because I believe in the LANA program and wanted to share about it! 

A Berry Cute Snack

My sproutlets and I received some happy mail the other day, a package from LearningZoneXpress! One of the items inside was LANA's Fruit & Vegetable Snack Recipes cookbook, from the LANA Preschool Program. It's a step by step picture cookbook for preschoolers and caregivers to use together. The recipes are simple, adorable, and nutritious, and the instructions even suggest which steps the child can do. I love that the pages are sturdy and laminated, no worries about my messy little helpers handling it :) We love it!

My Sprout picked out the Strawberry Mini-Mouse Nibbles snack recipe right away, strawberries are her favourite. 

The recipe calls for graham crackers, strawberries, berry cream cheese, mozzarella string cheese, and sliced almonds. We didn't have any graham crackers (I thought we did, but it turns out we had an empty graham cracker box... I'm sure other parents with older kids are familiar with that sort of discovery) but we had everything else.

And we did have berry rice cakes, they'd make a yummy substitute :) 

Sprout enjoyed spreading the cream cheese. She spread quite a bit on her tongue too!  And only 2 of the 4 mice actually survived the snack's preparation, the other 2 were eaten in the process :)

 

Aren't they adorable?! Easy and fun too :)

Thanks LANA & LearningZoneXpress  ♥

Happy Friday!