We’ve started realizing now that even though the kids are getting bigger and can entertain themselves when it’s time to make dinner, we’re still in a bit of a rut.

Well, it’s time to take action and start getting creative again. This time we’re going to make sure that the kids get involved and start to try new things. Whenever one of the kids turns his nose up at something delicious like homemade ravioli or chicken satay, we like to remind them that someday they’re going to miss the delicious food their mom and dad made for them when they were kids – the college dorm food won’t compare!

So we’re on the hunt now for some adult-worthy kid food. Here’s some our findings:

Rachael Ray’s Honey Teriyaki Chicken with Ripe Pineapple Spears and Black and White Rice Balls – Since the kids love the chicken teriyaki at the sushi bar, this should be a hit.

The Neely’s Grilled BBQ Potato Skins – This delight has pulled pork which our kids love. Mashed potatoes, bacon, BBQ sauce, pulled pork, sour cream, bacon. Did we mention bacon? We’re making this this weekend!

Food for Thoughts’ Lime Chicken Empanadas with Ranchero Ranch Dressing – Our kids are nuts over chicken potpie and love dipping their veggies in ranch dressing. This recipe is like a personal potpie that you get to dip in ranch dressing. It’s a perfect combination!

The Pioneer Woman Cook! Risotto Primavera – The kids already eat risotto without much hassle. They eat the cooked vegetables in potpie. This dish has a few extra veggies in it that aren’t in potpie, but they are cut into such small pieces that it’ll be impossible for them to pick them out! Ha ha, they’ll have to eat them!

What recipes do you make that your kids devour and you love too? Please share!

Our nature hike/scavenger hunt day was very wet, but everyone still had a terrific time!

Each mommy had a terrific plan for what to do on her day and the activities/crafts/snacks were unique each day.  It was such an amazingly good time for all that we knew we’d do it again in the summer.  (And why wouldn’t we?  We EASILY have 3 days worth of sewing or deep house-cleaning or lounging in the back yard with a stack of novels and a pitcher of lemonade…)

And once again we find so much inspiration from other mothers and blogs around the internet that we feel we must share.

This adorable summer camp play set from Tweet Toys by Willow Baus makes us want to shrink ourselves and JUMP into that canoe!

Make and Takes has a great list of activities in their Summer Camp for Kids section, including this very cool kid-made stick raft.

And though we are already married and don’t know anyone planning nuptials anytime soon, we’re bookmarking this Summer Camp-inspired wedding on the Ritzy Bee Blog.  Maybe we need to renew our vows???  (We can start the planning on the days the kiddos are off at summer camp!)

All right, we’ve noticed there seems to be a bit of a canoe/boating theme to our summer-camp round-up.  So we’ll break away from boating to share this tutorial.  Because we all know it wouldn’t be summer (or summer camp) without whipping up a slew of friendship bracelets!  We think these look easy enough for pretty young kids to put together, too.

We like to do a craft on camp days and we NEED to have a snack.  During spring-break camp one mama had the kiddos work some pretzel dough and bake up yummy treats that worked as both.  And for summer camp we think these frozen bananas are a cute, delicious and relatively easy idea!

And finally, we feel like we’d be remiss to leave you without offering some guidance from other mamas who’ve done this make-your-own-summer-camp thing.  Camp Wannalaffa-lotta from Life as Mom looks like a pretty good place to start.

Now go have fun!

The Art Institute of Chicago - photo by 10deMayo

Armed with a stack of postcards we set out exploring the museum. It was so much fun seeing the kids really looking at the art trying to decide if it was the right piece that was on the postcard – which was especially difficult for them when it came to all the Monets at the Institute.

Their attention spans lasted about an hour and a half, and that was about perfect for all of us. They got to see some wonderful – and famous – art. We got to see their minds expand. The best part was that the only reward for their success was the big stack of art postcards that they could say they saw in person, and you know what, they were happy as clams with that!

American Gothic by Grant Wood - one of the paintings we searched for in The Art Institute of Chicago

So now that the weather here in the Northwest is finally turning summer-like (we’re a bit jealous of the rest of the country’s heat), we were thinking that perhaps we would do another treasure hunt. This time here in the neighborhood.

For the little ones who can’t read yet, we thought that we would find pictures of things like roses, a slide, porch swing, and a dog. To challenge our new readers, they get a written list of more specific things to find.

Here’s our list:

• Ford truck
• Black and white cat
• Tire swing
• Street sign (with a specific street name)
• Red bicycle
• House with a blue door
• Mailbox #8
• Purple flower
• Garden gnome
• Tall ladder

Look for a red bike

Give the kids a camera and have them document all their findings. If your kids are old enough to wander the neighborhood, give them a time limit and let them run loose for an hour or so. (Our kids have walkie talkies so we can keep track of their whereabouts.)

Put a black and white cat on your list

There doesn’t need to be any elaborate reward for a treasure hunt like this. Maybe make some yummy lemonade or homemade popsicles while the kids are on their hunt and treat them to that when they return. Just having the freedom to roam the neighborhood is usually reward enough for our kids.

Whatever you do, just get outside and enjoy summer!

One day we’re all geared up to hike the neighborhood trails with the kiddies, looking for bugs and birds and taking notes in our new nature journals…

and the next we want to lounge on the patio with a good book and a tall glass of homemade lemonade.

One day we want to let the kids create a Picaso-esque masterpiece on the driveway with crazy-colorful chalk…

and another day we think it would be terrific to put hubby in charge of grilling dinner by providing him with some EXCELLENT homemade BBQ sauce!

One day we decide for SURE it’s a good day to just splash and play in the kiddie pool with our colorful sponge-balls…

and the next we’re planning to schlep all our gear to the ocean (or at least the pool) to *REALLY* play in the water!

What are your lazy, crazy, warm summer-day plans?  Whatever they are, enjoy them and let us know what you’re up to!

But lately we’ve been inspired to renew our own interests, even if just in the tiny bursts of time we have between one child falling asleep for a nap and another coming home from school.

And we thought we’d share the inspiration.  Some of us used to love running and we’ve found a lot of mamas online who do, too.  We love hearing how they carve out time to get a run in (even when it involves getting up before the sun – and kids – to get it done.)

Photography is quite an easy hobby to have in short bits of time and is OBVIOUSLY handy when it comes time to whip up a Mother’s Day or Father’s Day gift for a grandparent.  (We’re sure they aren’t sick of the annual gifts of both serious and hilarious portraits of our little tweedles…)  We like taking a walk by ourselves when Daddy’s handling the kiddos or even taking them with us to the nature preserve to get great shots of wildlife.

Sewing, we’ve decided, is a hard hobby to maintain with little ones running about.  We make time for it anyway because we adore it so much.  But the next time the baby lays down on the foot pedal and nearly makes a zig-zag through our pointer finger, we may retire for a while.  Still, there are an endless amount of inspiring blogs online filled with ideas and tutorials and so many amazing things for our closet and our home and especially our kiddos.

It’s probably because of the lack of a motor-driven appliance that we have been excited to pick up knitting and crocheting with our little rugrats around.  Sure, pointy metal sticks come with their own hazardous effects, but it sure is a much easier item to haul out when the kiddos are occupied or put away quickly when they suddenly need a peanut-butter sandwich.

We’ve always been into gardening but during the years the babes were being born we let our landscape slip a bit.  Now that they’re old enough to “help” we’ve put in a new vegetable garden and added some new perennials to the front yard.  It all looks gorgeous, we feel invigorated after a morning spent working in the sunshine, and our kiddos appreciate the dinner-time vegetables they helped grow.  Whether you’ve gardened before or this is your first time, the inspiration found online is simply stunning.

One of our mama-friends is a painter and we’re always admiring the gorgeous pieces she creates in just a few strung-together naptimes.  We like to think of it as the perfect marriage of photography and sewing.  But we only say that because we can’t even paint the side of the house without making some sort of disaster.  Maybe we could follow tutorials like this to hone a new craft?

What sorts of hobbies do you have, mamas?  What did you do before you had kids?  Have you let all your hobbies disappear?  What would you like to learn or take back up?  Let’s inspire each other!

Now our kids are of talent show age, and as much as we’d like to spare them the humiliation of going on stage without really having a talent, we know that everyone must have their opportunity to learn a lesson about confidence…and sometimes being able to laugh at one’s self – even if they don’t see the talent show this way for many years after, like we did.

So encourage away, we do. Sing a song, do some taekwondo, flip the yo-yos, tell a joke. There may even be some real talent amongst the bunch. Plus when you’re young, you are fascinated by anything different that little Johnny can do that you can’t. And to be honest, as parents, we love the fact that little Suzie has the courage to get up on stage and bust some moves – we love a good giggle as much as anyone!

If your school doesn’t do a talent show or your kiddies are still a little young, you can pull off a fun talent show of your own. With a little planning, your family, or maybe even your whole neighborhood, could be whooping it up in no time.

Here are some sites that offer tips for producing a neighborhood talent show that everyone will love.

• A Talent Show with Soul on familyfun.go.com
• Kids’ Talent Shows: Ideas that Can Be Funny and Creative on suite101.com
• Talent Shows for Fun & Fundraising on volunteerspot.com (This one may be a little too much for a small neighborhood show, but it could spur some ideas for your smaller show.)
• How to Plan a Youth Talent Show on ehow.com
• How to Plan a Talent Show on wikihow.com

Be sure to remind your kids that the talent show is for fun. If you’re going to have a winner, perhaps just have it based on audience applause. The more fun, the better!

It’s obviously a chicken and egg question that likely needs no answer.  Because of course whichever comes first, we reap the benefits either way.

Whether it is smelling the grass before we pick ourselves back up from a fall…

Or petting the bummer lambs a family friend is raising to rejoin the flock…

Or finding a few fun little bugs and worms while digging in the dirt-hole of last year’s garden…

Or standing in awe watching a herd of 200 elk pass through our rural property on a snowy spring morning…

(Or seriously…just enjoying the fact that it surprised us on May 16th with a few inches of snow-fall at our mountain retreat!)

Or sitting crouched in the playhouse with our daughter while she crushes dandelions for “tea…”

Or savoring the moment our toddler sticks a flower in our hair and says, “Guess what, Mommy?”  And we respond with, “What?” and he says, “I just love you.”

It’s not that we wouldn’t notice these things if we weren’t being conscious about life.  (Come on, even WE in our regular hustly-bustly, busy lives would notice our adorable one telling us out of the blue that he loves us!)  But the moments in which we are letting life come to us and fulfill us seem to take on a new preciousness when we are letting THOSE MOMENTS  be what life is all about in the first place.  So rather than noticing a ladybug on our arm as just a cute moment within the busy-work of trying (yet again) to get a garden planted while our 1 and 3 year olds try picking the plants and seeds back out of the soil, we somehow are finding a new way to connect in that moment and appreciate all that is going on.  Sure, we’re less focused on getting those garden rows to be perfect.  And we care a lot less about getting ALL the varieties of vegetables planted that we originally had intended.  But we still know there will be plenty of produce filling our tummies this summer, and a mountain of memories and moments filling our hearts and minds.

We mentioned before that it’s a priority for our family to start making our lives more simple, and in return for the simplicity, we get to slow down a bit.

Well, we’ve discovered that we’re not alone in our quest for a slower life. After running across a mention of the Slow Family Living Movement on ohdeedoh, we did some investigating.

The Slow Family Living Movement is the brainchild of two women in Texas who believe that “family life is being hijacked by society’s messages that more is better, faster is greater and that you and your children are at risk of being left behind, unless you buy in NOW.”

We love their idea that by intentionally slowing down family life, you’ll bring value to your children’s lives and in turn to your community.

“We believe that family life can serve as the incubator for deeper compassion, creativity, love, harmony, humor, appreciation, respect, fun, ingenuity, conflict resolution, peace, friendship, growth, communication and, perhaps above all else, true, unending and powerful joy.

As we intentionally give value and space to family life, we are thereby creating a force — with a sum greater than its parts — that can then flow out into the local and the global communities.”

You can read their whole Manifesto here.

So with summer on the doorstep and the kids getting ready to finish up another school year, we think we’ll begin to embrace the Slow Family Living Movement. Do the kids really need to go to camp, play soccer, visit the zoo and children’s museum, and have scheduled play dates every week. Probably not. We might just try having picnics in the park, playing in the sprinklers, and hanging out in the driveway making chalk art – all without putting it on the calendar.

We’ll see how it goes.

We eat quite healthy food in this house, but sadly we have let “occasional” treats and desserts become a little too common.  How to detoxify our family of sweets?  Well, lucky for us it is spring (somewhere, we’re sure…) and delicious berries and lusciously rich fruits are becoming more and more available.

We think these Strawberry-Ricotta-Graham Tartlets from Smitten Kitchen will make a nice segue from our former chocolatey-cookie-cake-ice-creamy ways and into even less sugar-filled choices.   They also seem like an excellent choice for company rather than our formerly over-the-top indulgent treats.

We love cooking with our kids (apparently too much…) and love this new magazine, Chop Chop,  we found that celebrates getting kiddos in the kitchen AND teaching them about eating healthy and enjoying all things in moderation.  This recipe for carrot cupcakes is an easy one that uses whole wheat flour and is heavy on the carrots and light on the sugar.  We might also try making these sans frosting to use as a breakfast accompaniment to fresh fruit and yogurt.

Eating healthy can’t mean forsaking chocolate entirely, however.  No one wants to be made to feel like there’s something they simply CAN’T have, right?  These “Cocoa-Nut” Bananas might very well fit the bill.   Also on EatingWell.com are these cinnamon oranges which are sure to be a big hit with our citrus-loving kiddos.

And what sunny afternoon outside wouldn’t be made better with a delicious fruit parfait?  Though a recipe is hardly required to whip up a concoction such as this, we stumbled upon the idea to swap out the granola typically used in a more breakfast-style parfait for crumbled-up cookies to make it a bit more, well, desserty.  Graham crackers, vanilla wafer cookies or a few slightly stale chocolate chip cookies left over from the last bake sale would all add a touch of guilty-sweetness without the pure guilt of letting the kiddos go wild with a jar full of cookies.  (Not that we’ve ever done that, of course…)  Layer your yogurt, fresh fruit and cookie crumbles in tall glasses or other fun vessels and watch their faces light up!

Something tells us we aren’t going to be shelling out $50 for a Popsicle maker, but if we DID, then we’d definitely spring for the super cool Zoku from Williams-Sonoma.   In addition, we’d pick up Pops! Icy Treats for Everyone by Krystina Castella.  It’s another one of those, “Surely you don’t need a RECIPE for THAT!” kinds of things…but then again, check out her recipes!  We do need a recipe for that.

And of course we also know that we’ll have to remind ourselves AND our children that not every meal needs to be followed by something sweet, even a “healthy” sweet.  Here’s to a healthy spring and summer everyone!

Some of our kidlets enjoying a very cold and rainy scavenger hunt in the park during spring break

We’re feeling inspired.  Inspired by the gorgeous spring weather that seems to have finally shown up here in our home state.  Inspired by watching our kiddos explore the woods adjacent to the new park in our neighborhood.  And inspired by some reading we’ve been doing about the value of nature-based learning on today’s little ones who are experiencing a pitifully minute amount of time outdoors.

Just the other day we were introduced to the book Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louv.  And though we have not yet had time to read the whole thing, we are astounded by the notion that some generation of our kids could very well be the last to enjoy frolicking in the woods, exploring a stream or wandering aimlessly through a meadow.

And it’s not just Mr. Louv who’s started to be aware of and alarmed by how little time our children spend outdoors.  Recent studies are suggesting that children are spending anywhere from 45% to 90% (90%…can you believe it?) of their free time inside.  Nature-based schools and curriculums like this one in Philadelphia are popping up all over – partly due to our increased interest in nature and partly due to our decreased connection with nature.

Some of the bits we’ve read hint that not only could childhood obesity and the rising cases of pediatric heart disease be aided and eradicated by more outside-time for kids, but possibly so could many anxiety, attention and depression disorders that many of our nation’s children are struggling with.  Groups like the Children & Nature Network provide a lot of guidance, advice and motivation for families looking for ways to spend more time outdoors.  The group is also largely focused on providing outdoor programs for city children who might not otherwise have access to “wild” outdoors.

screech owl at Tualatin River National Wildlife Refuge

And to return to the source of our inspiration this week, (albeit with a mitigating sense of urgency,) we are welcoming this gorgeous spring weather.  And even though yesterday brought us a cool and cloudy morning, a gorgeously sunny lunchtime and an afternoon hail shower with pellets the size of marbles, we are gathering up our raingear and heading outdoors.  Whether we take a walk though a local wetlands and snap pictures with a budding photographer, putter around some more in our soaking-wet garden, or pick up some books with LOADS of zany outdoor game ideas – like Old Fashioned Children’s Games or Run, Jump, Hide, Slide, Splash: The Best 200 Outdoor Games Ever we know we’re getting outside more.  Hopefully we’ll see you there!

Even taking off on a space adventure is good time spent outdoors!