Christmas Treat Making

Along with Christmas comes baking. I have been doing way too much of it. Seriously. It makes me a little sick to look at all of the treats sitting on our kitchen counter.
I had Hailey help me with some of my baking. We made Holiday Pretzel Treats. Hailey loved it. She had so much fun unwrapping all of the candy kisses. She even did a great job sorting the wrapper from the chocolate. I’m not gonna lie, I was very pleasantly surprised with how well Hailey did with making these treats. She didn’t try to eat a single kiss. And she did a great job putting kisses on the pretzels. I put the kisses on the pretzels all in order in a line, but Hailey chose to be random. Even stretching to the very farthest pretzel from her. Cracked me up.


After the pretzels came out of the oven, with the chocolate soft, I let Hailey try to smash an M&M into the chocolate. Can you tell which one she did? After that I decided that wasn’t the best idea. It wasn’t long before I heard Hailey complaining about her eye.

Hailey had gotten chocolate on her hand, and then rubbed her eye. She also couldn’t wait the 4-6 minutes for the chocolate to soften and began eating M&Ms. Actually, sucking on them in her hand and making a mess. So, things went pretty smoothly until it was time to bake. Which was still great. This was definitely the least stressful and messy recipe we’ve made together. I’d totally do it again.

Kids | ROYGBP: The Colors of the Rainbow

ROYGBP. 

Isn’t that how you spell rainbow? ROYGBP totally equals rainbow. Or it should. Because that’s what I taught Hailey.

Ok, that’s not really what I taught her, but it kind of looks like it.



I quickly made some activity pages (download here) for Hailey with outlined letters on them. One for each letter of the rainbow. ROYGBP. Get it? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. 

Ah, yes. ROYGBP does equal rainbow!

Anyway, we ripped up our construction paper into little bits of paper, rubbed glue all over our letter and pressed on our pieces of paper.

I’ve seen this activity done in different ways all over the internet. Thank you Pinterest. I’ve seen moms using different small things that can be glued onto paper, glitter for the letter G, sprinkles for the letter S. I don’t have any fun things like that immediately on hand, but I do have an abundance of construction paper.

I thought this would be a fun activity to teach her about the colors of the rainbow and some letters. Hailey already recognizes all of the letters, so we focused on what each of these letters say. We did this activity way back in October. And she still knows what sounds the letters r, o, y, g, b, and p say.

Using a glue stick was also a fun way to help her get a feel of how to write the letters. With my help, she traced the letters while applying glue to the page.

Hailey wasn’t super interested in decorating her letters. I did most of it, and tried to encourage her to help. Hailey was focused on coloring with the glue stick. She totally missed the point of the glue. In hindsight, I wish I had bought the glue sticks with the colored glue that dries clear. That way she could see where the glue is on the page and then maybe it’d be easier for her to figure it out. 

I saved up all of the ripped paper that we didn’t use, thinking I’d use it for something else sometime. The other day I came up with another way to use that paper.

I took my small muffin tin with 6 spots and placed one piece of paper, each a different color, in each spot. 

I then spread out other ripped up bits of paper and had Hailey sort the colors. She did surprising well with this. She even got a little silly and put the pieces in the wrong places on purpose. It didn’t keep her attention super long, but it’s an easy activity for us to pull out for a few minutes every few days.

I’m thinking about doing this with other objects. Letters, numbers, shapes, pictures… you name it.