Nutrition and Children Category
Helping Your Children To Eat Their Vegetables
Today is national Eat Your Veggies Day (we are sure a mom thought of this holiday 
) To celebrate, we have some fun ideas to help your children eat a variety of healthy vegetables.
Tips for encouraging children to eat their vegetables:
- Introduce a variety of vegetables early on and often. If your child has repeated opportunities to sample new foods, at least some of them will be accepted.
- Include vegetables in foods your children already like – make zucchini or banana muffins instead of chocolate or sugar-filled muffins.
- Switch from soda or fruit drinks to 100% fruit juice.
- Make fruit smoothies. This will give your child fruit and calcium!
- Make a healthy trail mix for a snack with raisins, nuts, and non-sugary cereal.
Fun kid-friendly vegetable recipes:
- T-Rex pizza
- Mini Technicolor Veggie Pizza
- Galloping Good Eggplant
- Creamed Dill Potatoes
- Red Pepper Walnut Dip (great to dip veggies in!)
How will you celebrate Eat Your Veggies Day?
Fruity Frog Craft for Friday Fun Day
Fresh fruit is in abundance during the summertime and this fruity frog craft makes healthy eating fun and delicious for kids!
Ingredients:
- One green apple (makes four apple frogs)
- Cream cheese
- Chocolate chips
- Grapes
- One piece of green construction paper
- Scissors (adult use or supervised use by children)
- Knife (adult use only)
- Pencil
Instructions:
1. Cut the apple into four pieces and remove the core.
2. On one piece cut a thin wedge, and remove, to create a mouth
3. To create the eyes, shape the cream cheese into two half-inch balls. If you are making four frogs you will need eight cream cheese eyes.
4. Insert a chocolate chip, either direction, into each cream cheese ball.
5. If you are making one frog, cut three grapes in half. Two halves will be the arms. Cut the other four halves to create toes.
6. Draw a lily pad on a piece of green construction paper. Cut out the shape.
7. Place the apple slice on the green lily pad. Add the eyes (cream cheese balls) on top. Place the two grape halves on both sides. Slice lines to add the toes/feet.
Serve your child their healthy, delicious, and frogalicious lunch!
Do you have nutritious tips for families? Please share in our comment section!
Thanks to FamilyFun.com for sharing this frog craft with the Kolcraft family.
For more ideas about healthy eating with children, visit these Baby Matters archives:
Nutritious Baby Finger Foods
Is your baby ready to start exploring the world of finger foods? How about starting baby out on the right little foot with healthy baby finger food? We love the site Wholesome Baby Food because it has easy-to-make recipes for baby finger foods, tips for what baby food to give at what stage and much more!
Check out the site & let us know what is your favorite baby finger food!
Share Your Breakfast & Help A Child In Need
Wally shares his breakfast to help kids in need
We truly believe in giving your child a healthy start to her day by having a nutritious breakfast. We know it’s not always easy when you have a busy morning routine so we have had several wonderful interviews with moms who have all sorts of tips for healthy eating. We also love it when companies take social responsibility seriously & help promote healthy living while helping those who are less fortunate. Kellogg’s® is one of those companies.
Kellogg’s is having a Share Your Breakfast campaign where you share a photo of your breakfast and they will share breakfast with a child in need. Kellogg’s goal is to share one million breakfasts by the start of the 2011-2012 school year. It’s really simple. All you have to do is:
- Upload or text a photo of your breakfast to Kellogg’s
- Share a simple description
- Enjoy the fact that your breakfast helped a child!
Wally shared his breakfast of yummy cereal this morning! We think this campaign is a great way to teach your child that sharing helps other people and makes them happy. Will you make a difference for a hungry child by sharing your breakfast?
Pancake Party & Recipes for Your Kids
Did you know that back in 1882 on this day pancakes were first made in New York City? We think this is a great opportunity to celebrate the wonderful world of pancakes with a little pancake party!
What you need:
- Ingredients for pancakes (we like these yummy recipes)
- Various fruit toppings for pancakes
- A seal-able plastic bag
- Scissors (adult use only)
- Optional – supplies for decorating
What to do:
- Declare tonight a pancake party night.
- Cut up fruit for toppings and put in individual bowls to make a pancake topping bar.
- Make pancake batter and put in seal-able bag. Cut a hole (not too big) in the corner of the bag and squeeze the batter out, writing letters to spell your child’s name or initials. The size of the hole will determine the size of the letters.
- Decorate kitchen with streamers & make party hats to add a little flair to your pancake party.
Have fun at your pancake party!
Healthy Easy-To-Make Holiday Treats for Kids
It’s holiday time and often that means an overdose of sugar. We have a holiday treat that is fun to make & good for you! We love these fruit snowmen that we know your kids will love to make and eat! (We didn’t have the carrot for the nose or the pretzel sticks for the arms so we made due with what we had. They look cuter with pretzel arms )
Ingredients
- Bananas
- Grapes
- Carrot
- Apple
- Bamboo skewers
- Raisins
- Pretzel sticks
Instructions
1. For each snowman, you will need three thick slices of banana, a grape, a sliver of carrot, and a triangular piece of apple.
2. Slide the fruit onto the skewer, and then use the carrot slivers for noses, raisins for eyes and buttons, and pretzel sticks for arms.
Experiment with other fruit and vegetables!
What healthy holiday recipes do you have to share?
Winter Veggies To Warm Your Insides!
It’s the long lull of Winter, but the cold brings some wonderful nutritious vegetables for you and your family! Sweetened Acorn Squash is an easy recipe to prepare and is packed with nutrients!
Ingredients
- Acorn squash
- 1 cup fresh cranberries (if frozen, be sure to thaw before using)
- 1/2 cup maple syrup or a teaspoon of Cinnamon
- 1 tablespoon butter, cut into cubes
Preparation
- Cut the squash in half and remove the seeds.
- Place in a roasting pan and add 1/2 inch of water to the bottom of the pan.
- Put a cube of butter in each acorn half.
- Put about half a teaspoon of Cinnamon in each half.
- Divide the cranberries between the acorn halves (if you don’t add Cinnamon, you can drizzle maple syrup on top the squash).
- Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
- Bake on the middle shelf for 1 hour, or until the squash feels tender when pierced with a small, sharp knife and the cranberries are tender and juicy.
- Enjoy!
Tell us some of your Winter Veggie recipes!
Help for Your Picky Eater
Soon your pickey eater will love his veggies too!
Do meal times become an exercise of frustration as you try to get your child to eat her veggies and not be such a picky eater? You want your child to have healthy eating habits so he can grow and develop, but sometimes it seems impossible to get him to like anything that comes from a garden! My mom shutters when she remembers what a picky eater I was. She tried everything from sending me to my room if I didn’t eat, to not letting me play outside after dinner, to having me just sit there until I ate everything off my plate. (That never quite worked because I knew eventually she would have to let me go to bed. ) One day mom had the brilliant idea of letting my sister and I take turns picking out the vegetable for dinner.
I was in heaven. I knew that almost every other day, I had a choice. I finally had control over what ended up on my little Peter Rabbit plate! I was so proud of my veggie choice that I made sure to eat all my vegetables so as to prove I picked the most delicious vegetable. I was sure my whole family looked forward to my wonderful vegetable choices. I began to be interested in my sister’s vegetable choices as well and soon the vegetable wars in our house ended.
If you have a picky eater who doesn’t like to eat veggies, have her pick out the vegetable for dinner. Take it a step further and if you can, bring her to the grocery store with you and let her pick the veggies out of the produce aisle. She will feel involved in the process and most likely will be more willing to eat her veggies, because she was able to contribute and choose.
Do you have a picky eater who doesn’t like vegetables? What advice do you have to get children to eat their veggies?
Healthy Summer Snacks for Your Kids
July is national Blueberry month (who knew right?). What better way to celebrate this vitamin-packed fruit than to make some healthy blueberry treats with your kids?
Fun Friday Blueberry Yogurt Popsicles
What you will need:
- 12 paper or foil baking cups, 2 1/2 inch size
- Zest and juices of one small lemon
- 2 cups plain nonfat yogurt
- 1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar (We like to use sugar in the raw or Stevia. If using one of these substitutes, use less than recipe calls for.)
- 1 pint blueberries
- 12 popsicle sticks
- Line twelve 2 1/2-inch muffin pan cups with the paper or foil baking cups.
Ready, Set, Make!
- In a bowl, blend the lemon zest, lemon juice, yogurt, and sugar until smooth.
- Stir in the blueberries.
- Divide the mixture within the paper-lined muffing pan cups.
- Freeze for 1 1/2 hours, or until almost firm: insert a popsicle stick in the middle of each popsicle.
- Freeze until firm, about 2 hours.
- To serve, peel off the paper liners and let the popsicles stand at room temperature for about 4 to 6 minutes to soften slightly for easier eating.
If you want to store them in the freezer for a longer time, cover them with plastic wrap.
What healthy summer recipes for kids do you have to share?
It’s Tip Tuesday
Today’s Tip Tuesday talks about your toddler. (Yes, we did want to see how many t’s we could put in that sentence! ) It’s no secret that toddler’s can be fussy eaters. At times meals can turn into “food wars” if your toddler won’t eat. All sorts of tactics are used from bribing them to desperate pleas to eat. One way to make your toddler’s mealtime fun is to use a cookie cutter to make his food into fun shapes. Your toddler will look forward to see what surpise shapes will be on his plate!
What creative ways have you helped a fussy toddler eat his food?
