We were all worn out. The daily grind had ground us up and spit us out. Between work, keeping up with the house, obligations and our two small kids we were just tired. What we needed was a change of pace. Instead of another night fighting with our kids to eat their dinner at the table (yes…all of it), we decided to do things a little differently this day have a fun family movie night.
Sometimes all it takes is switching things up a bit to break the tension and let everyone have fun together again. So I set out to make it a fun and relaxing movie night for all of us.
I headed out on my errands and stopped at Walmart to pick a few things up. I threw a few extra fun treats in the cart to make a quick and easy meal. Since I wanted everyone to enjoy themselves, that technically included me, so I picked out some Tyson Popcorn Chicken because I know that means less time spent cooking and cleaning on my part. {To see more on my shopping trip click here}
When I saw the signage for The Fast & The Furious 6 pre-sale at Walmart, it inspired me to make a car themed movie night. Since The Fast and The Furious isn’t exactly age appropriate for my 3 & 1 year old, we decided to stick with Disney Cars for this night, but the hubs and I will have to go back on September 12 to see The Fast and The Furious Demos they will be doing at Walmart since we both love action movies! {To find out if your Walmart will be having a demo click here!}
I threw some apples, teddy grahams, carrots, string cheese, Angry Birds cheese crackers and toothpicks in the cart as well. The makings of a car themed dinner were coming together.
If I know anything about kids (and it is still debatable if I do!) I know that the word dinner has a certain connotation to them. They think that it means you are going to force them to eat something they totally don’t want to. So tonight, even though the easy meal I was preparing them was hearty enough to be dinner, we were going to call it a snack.
Now snacks, those are fun. Kids love to eat snacks. So I started to make our fun and easy car snacks for the movie night. I took the carrots and cheese and cut them up so that they were round pieces. I then heated up the chicken and cut the apples into slices. I used toothpicks to secure the “wheels” onto the “cars,” using cheese on the chicken and carrots on the apples. Then of course every car must have a driver, so I cut a small slit in the popcorn chicken and a notch out of the apple so I could put the angry birds and teddy bear crackers in the cars. {Make sure to take extra care to remove the toothpicks before the kids eat the cars}
The whole thing came together in only a few minutes and the kids had meat, fruit, veggies, cheese and crackers on their plates cleverly disguised as cars. To put the finishing touch on I used a non-toxic marker to draw a road around the edges of a paper plate, because on family fun night every kid needs a free pass to play with their food, right?! The stage was set for a successful evening.
When dinnertime rolled around Dad and I announced that we weren’t having any dinner tonight! {What?! No dinner?!} We were having a family movie night with fun snacks instead!
The kids were beside themselves. They got to watch a movie, in jammies, with snacks, and eat in the living room! A three year old’s dream come true! Smiles abounded.
We gave them their snacks and watched their faces light up as they played with their food. Some how the cars started out driving on the road but ended up driving straight through their mouths and into their bellies. We ended up with two completely empty plates with out a single dinnertime battle.
At the end of the night all of us were smiling, laughing and spending time together. It may have just been dinner and a movie, but a light-hearted change of pace was just what this family needed to recharge our batteries and fill our tanks.
I think family movie night will become a tradition here! What fun family traditions do you have that break the routine and keep everyone smiling?
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