Dr. Seuss Dinner

This dinner was so fun.  I liked the decorations and the food and costumes.  I read lots of Dr. Seuss books to the kids throughout the week to get us in the mood. Apparently, we had a lot more Dr. Seuss things than I thought.

We were watching three extra kids for a couple of days.  They enjoyed doing the festivities with us.  The kids all made Cat in the Hat decorations.

Lots of fun were had with these hats.

I cut out some pictures from a Dr. Seuss preschool book I found.  Then I taped the small ones onto blocks and the large ones onto the wall.  We looked super Dr. Seuss-ified.

Most of us were either Thing 1 or a Star Bellied Sneetch.

Hannah was not so interested in picture taking. Let's play guess the book which inspired these dishes.

Cat in the Hat parfaits!

Green Eggs and Ham!  These were more loved than I thought they would be.

Hop on Pop! Popcorn.

Butter Battle Book! I was pretty proud of this creation.

ABC's Book! We just had to drink pink ink like the Yink!

The Lorax! I made these cute cupcakes with the colorful trees that the Lorax is trying to protect. The cotton candy was a huge hit.

Anyway, with three extra kids and so much food and decorations there was no space for the kids to sit.  So they got a sheet on the living room floor.  Will and I and the two two year olds stayed at the table.

It was such a fun meal.  I think I liked it as much as the kids.

From Different Countries

We have had two different themed dinners with food from outside our country.  First was our history dinner - food from Ancient Greece.

We wanted to make some homemade decorations for the evening.  Here Adam is stirring our salt dough.  Whitney gives him the thumbs up sign.

We used the dough to make some vases.  Then we baked them for several hours.

Afterwards the kids painted their vases.  They all turned out really cute.  Even I painted one and I put symbols and designs like what can be found on Ancient Greek vases. 

And the kids each made their own Greek column.

Dressing Greek.  Hannah's toga didn't last long. 

We had some colorful togas.

It is hard to tell what we ate, but I did a lot of research on Ancient Greek food.  Apparently, the women would spend hours everyday pounding the wheat to make flour.  I felt spoiled just opening a bag.  But, in my defense, flour has been harder to get lately.  I made homemade bread.  We used olive oil on top, instead of butter.  We also ate cucumber slices and hard boiled eggs.  I guess meat was mostly for festivals or the wealthy.  Anyway, the meal was simple but yummy.  You can see some of our columns in the background. 

Loukoumades for dessert.  I made some of the fried dough with traditional honey syrup, but I covered the rest with cinnamon and sugar to keep my kids happy.  It was a delicious meal.  

So Fancy

Our next themed dinner was fancy - very fancy, for our house.

Getting the setting ready.

We all decided this was simple but elegant.

Everyone dressed up really nice for the dinner.

Of course, pictures became silly really quickly.  But that is how fancy works in our house.

I made chicken cordon bleu for the dinner.  I had never made them before and I was a little worried.  But they turned out yummy.  We also had rolls (which were devoured) and veggies (which were ignored).

Rachel shows off our two fancy desserts.  We had Oreo cheesecake and chocolate covered strawberries.  All the kids agreed that the strawberries were better.

Anyway, it was fun to be fancy for the evening.  I don't think I could pull it off every night though.

Harry Potter dinner

Our second themed was Harry Potter.

We made a Harry Potter Tablecloth

Hannah drew on her face more then the tablecloth.

We bought Harry Potter decorations for our dinner.

We got all dressed up.

I did not smile for this picture.

Hannah is so cute in this picture.

We had a Hogwarts dinner.

Green for Slytherine

Yellow for Huffelpuff

Red for Gryfindor.

We had butterbeer for desert.

As you can see we had a fun time. Whitney wrote this blogpost.

Our First Themed Dinner

One of my friends posted on her Facebook page about doing themed dinners in their family during this pandemic.  I thought it was a cute idea and we decided to give it a try.  I made a list of different theme ideas, asking the kids what they liked, and then everyone was allowed to vote on three of them.  The ones with the most votes would get to be first.  Our first theme ended up being a happy unbirthday party.

We made a long poster for decorating our kitchen; it is hard to find a happy unbirthday sign, but we had fun making it ourselves.

The kids had a lot of fun painting and putting glitter everywhere.

And a birthday party needs balloons, of course.  Will brought in the fan and we watched the balloon fly all over the living room.

Trying to balance a balloon on the head.

I bought streamers for our kitchen ceiling.

Each kid even got an unbirthday present, a little egg with a toy or stickers inside. 

Rachel loving her bunny, now named Picnic.

I didn't get a picture of our dinner.  It was just pizza from Dominoes since pizza is pretty much what we always eat for our actual birthdays. Then we had ice cream.  So easy and yummy.

Will grew extra long ears.

A very merry unbirthday to everyone.  We have decided to do a different themed dinner every Saturday until we get through all our themes, or until we get bored of it. So take a guess on our next theme.