Giving thanks for good books
Save room for some good holiday reading.
Between waiting for the food to waiting for the check, a typical evening at a restaurant requires parents to perform a circus routine to keep the kids busy.
Now think about Thanksgiving. It’s the stress of a restaurant meal times 1,000. The once-a-year meal takes longer to make and eat. There are more people involved. And children are out of arm’s reach at the kids’ table.
We’ve got your back, Thanksgiving hosts everywhere. We’ve found easy ideas that require minimal effort to pull off while ensuring kids are satisfactorily occupied while the adults try to enjoy some turkey and fixings.
No-mess table crafts
You have plenty to do, if you’re the hostess with the mostest. So run on down to Michael’s and pick up a few low-cost items that require nothing more than the eager hands of children.
The Turkey Build-a-Scene Foam Kit By Creatology, which sells for $3 each, stands 8 inches tall and is put together with adhesive. The crafts store also sells Creatology assorted wooden fallthemed ornaments including scarecrows and pumpkins with markers and wooden fall-themed masks that can be painted. Both are $1.50. All items are sold only in the store.
Keep ’em laughing
The clever idea of keeping family, cousins and kids chaos free at the kids table comes to us from a blogger known as Bren Did.
She created this printable kids activity called the Thanksgiving Joke Teller. You don’t even need to come up with the jokes. She has taken care of that. You just need a printer, your hands to fold the squares with colorful turkeys and jokes on them into the shape of what you may know as cootie catchers or fortune tellers and you’re set.
“The joke tellers provide just enough of a distraction for me to breath, relax, and remind myself how blessed I am to have the whole rowdy bunch in my life,” she writes.
Don’t we all want that?
Doughn’t discount the power of squishy
Edible pumpkin dough can easily be shaped into cute pumpkins and be waiting at the table when young guests arrive and can be played with throughout the meal. (And in this instance they can play with their food, because this DIY recipe, courtesy of Kelly Dixon at Smart School House, is entirely edible.)
Ingredients
1 cup premade frosting (vanilla or white)
2 3⁄ cups powdered sugar
4 Orange food coloring
Small craft stick for the stem Various pumpkin accessories like green cupcake liners or whatever you have in your home
Various dough toys or utensils from your kitchen
Instructions
Add the powdered sugar to the frosting in slow increments using the mixing paddle attachment on your mixer, continually scraping the sides of the bowl. If you don’t have this type of mixer, just mix in a large bowl.
Before you add all of the powdered sugar, touch the play dough and, if it feels at all sticky, add the rest of the powered sugar.
Add the orange food coloring until you reach your desired shade of orange.
Considering that it is kind of hard to measure exactly one cup of frosting, you might have to eyeball the last quarter-cup of powdered sugar that is necessary for this dough.
It WILL take a lot more powdered sugar than it looks like, though (just continue to test the stickiness).
Roll it into one big ball and make sure it’s not crumbly or sticky. If you added a little too much powdered sugar, don’t worry! We aren’t perfect! Simply sprinkle a little olive oil onto the dough, and BOOM! Problem solved!
Shape into pumpkins and add the stem.
Give them candy to play with
Plates of steaming food are on the table, the turkey is carved and your child is ... where? Disappeared from the kids’ table. If you have this adorable apple turkey craft ready to go 15 minutes before all the dishes hit the table, your child will still be in his seat. This is the perfect craft to keep small hands busy so the adults can finish up last-minute preparations in the kitchen.
Rachel, a blogger at IHeartCraftyThings.com, learned to make these gobbly goodies from her mother:
Supplies
Apple
Toothpicks
Spice drops Marshmallow
Raisins
Candy corn
Red fruit snack or gummy candy
Directions
Poke three spice drops onto several toothpicks to make the turkey feathers. Insert the ends of the toothpicks along the back of the apple.
Poke a large marshmallow into another toothpick and into the front of your apple. Fill in your apple turkey’s face by poking in raisins for eyes, a candy corn beak and half a red fruit snack for the waddle.
Poke one spice drop onto the ends of two toothpicks and then insert them into the front of the turkey for the turkey legs and feet.
5. Make them work for dessert
Kids finish first. They always do. If you’re not ready to release them from the table — and hence have to worry about what they might be up to — bring out the Thanksgiving-themed cookies for them to decorate. Decorate sugar cookies with seasonal shapes like leaves or turkeys. Then bring out frosting and sprinkles for the kids to decorate.
Enjoy the rest of your meal while the children get a head start on dessert. More pie for you!