Kate eats a decent variety of foods considering she’s a preschooler, but veggies are still a bit of a sticking point. Enter the mini cookie cutters. Kate loves to use the cookie cutters and cucumbers are the perfect firmness for her.
First, peel and slice your cucumbers. I slice them maybe 1/4 of an inch thick? Maybe a touch thinner? Too thin and they don’t hold their shape well.
Then I give Kate a stack of slices and she punches out the pumpkins with the mini cookie cutter.
It’s nice because it took her a bit to punch all the way through which kept her occupied while I got everything else ready for the party.
And the veggie eating? Well, Kate is more likely to eat cucumbers when they’re fun shapes, but even more than that I make her eat the leftover bits before she can punch out a new pumpkin. Not in a militant way (at all, we avoid battles over food at our house) but she can’t punch out a new pumpin until she’s eaten the scraps from the last one. Sometimes that means that she only punches out one pumpkin and that’s ok. I’ll punch the rest (for her lunch or whatever) and put the scraps on salads. But today we were punching a whole cucumber for our little party and she ate all of the scraps! Honestly, I was amazed that she ate all of that. I even gave her a pass after she’d eaten about half of them and told her that she could just keep punching if she wasn’t hungry, but she assured me that she wanted to eat more. 🙂
And here’s our veggie tray. It was nice to be able to “cook” with Kate, but have her working on something independently so I could get everything else ready.