3 Clever Ways to Get your Kids Eating Healthily

We all know we’re supposed to eat five fruit or vegetables a day to get the right amount of vitamins and minerals in our diet, but it’s hard explaining to kids why we should eat this way – particularly if their favourite food is chocolate ice cream! It’s even harder if your child is a picky eater. Most mums just give in and supply a rotation of meals that contain their children’s preferred ingredients. But experts agree that it takes several tastes of a food stuff to establish whether a child truly dislikes it and we should encourage our children to broaden their palate as much as possible. Often it’s the texture, the method of cooking, and the presentation of food that influence how it is received. So how do we convince picky eaters to try something new? And how can we get them to eat their daily quota of fruit and vegetables?

Hiding Ingredients

One of the easiest ways of making sure your children eat the fruit and vegetables they claim not to like is to hide them in mixed dishes. Pasta sauces and soups, which mask the external appearance of ingredients, are great solutions for sneaking in hidden food stuffs. And what child doesn’t like bread or cake? Both of these can be adapted to include both fruit and vegetables – zucchini, banana, and pumpkin bread are very popular for just this purpose. 

Cutting Food into Fun Shapes

Image:kidworldcitizen.org

Surprisingly, sometimes it can take little more than rearranging elements on a plate to convince a picky eater to try something new. In Japan, kids’ lunch boxes, or ‘bento’ boxes, are examples of cute food presentation taken to the extreme, but it doesn’t actually have to take that much to create a visually attractive meal for your little one. Making faces from food is the simplest way, but did you ever also think of going to town with cookie cutters on these easy cooking recipes for kids? You can also use cookie cutters on cold cuts of meat, cheese, or fruit!

Rainbow Food

Picky eaters often complain that food looks bland or boring. And we can’t really blame them – some of the least favourite food stuffs do indeed look quite dull – think about fish or cauliflower! But what if you could brighten them up? Wouldn’t that make them more appealing? Some boring foods actually already exist in a variety of different colours – cauliflower, for example, is also can be purple. But if you can’t get hold of multicoloured variants, why not add a little food colouring to brighten up boring ingredients? Kids love rainbow-coloured meals and though the very best consist of plates stacked high with fresh fruit and vegetables, there’s no harm in tinting dishes that might otherwise remain uneaten. 

Read more...

Teaching Your Children To Tidy Up After Themselves

Most parents will be familiar with the struggle: children love creating a mess, but how on earth do you get them to clean up afterwards? Here are some tactics you might like to try to help encourage your children to tidy up after themselves in their bedroom and around the house.

Weekly Chores & Reward Points.

Like adults, kids respond excellently to incentives and the promise of future rewards. Establish a weekly chore list for each of your kids. Completion of a specific task – tidying their bedroom, dusting the living room, or helping you to load the washing machine – will be rewarded with a star on the chore list. Once your children accumulate a certain number of stars then they qualify for a reward such as money, a food treat, or fun activity.

Fun challenges.

You may be more successful in getting your kids to clean up after themselves if you treat cleaning as a fun activity, rather than a chore. Instead of telling them: “Take your worn clothes off the floor and put them in the laundry basket”, try asking: “Who will be the first to bring me 5 items of clothing lying on your bedroom floor?”

Image:homeforher.com

 

Delegating Responsibilities.

A household responsibility is a great way to make your children feel important and useful. How about giving each child his or her own cutlery and plate set? They are left responsible for washing and drying that set after each meal – if they don’t wash their plate then they have to deal with the consequence (in this case, a dirty plate to eat their dinner off of!). The same can be applied to worn clothes in their bedroom – if it doesn’t go into the laundry basket…it won’t be washed.

Involvement and Examples

Perhaps the main difference between adults and their children when it comes to cleaning is that both groups dislike the chore…it is just the kids who think that they can object their way out of it! Remember that your youngsters have an unnerving knack of following the example you set: if you appear reluctant or express a strong dislike of cleaning, then they are going to pick up on that and view domestic cleaning as something to avoid.

One way to help set a strong example is to involve the kids in your household cleaning tasks. While you don’t want young children to be handling the cleaning products, they can be encouraged to help you out. Perhaps they can clear all items off the kitchen surfaces before you disinfect them? Or else they can dust in the living room before you vacuum? Maybe they can sort the weekly laundry pile into ‘colours’ and ‘whites’, or help transfer their clothes from the washing machine to the drying rack, for instance?

Points to keep in mind.

Be consistent. If you permit your children to get out of their weekly cleaning responsibilities once, they will learn that it is possible for them to negotiate their way out of the tasks…and you end up back where you started!

Young children don’t usually have the patience and long-term vision that adults have. Be realistic when it comes to setting incentives for them – you want to set them a goal that they think they can achieve! A month can seem like an impossibly long eternity to small kids.

Read more...

DIY Home Improvement Tips for Christmas

Christmas is almost here. The time is to get everything up and running in the home to make sure nothing comes in the way of you and a fantastic Christmas celebration. Here are some of the DIY tips to make your place ready for the festivities.

With winter holidays and Christmas fast approaching you should be working overtime to make your home look all set for the festive season.   Although you can hire an interior designer or professional for this task, the best option would be to get yourself in the thick of things. With a little assistance from friends and family members and application of creativity you can also make your home look like as if it was done by an experienced professional. Here are some of the DIY tips that will help you in your endeavor:

Start early: Instead of leaving everything to last minute, as many of us like to do, one must start the preparations at least two weeks prior to Christmas. There is a lot of work that will require your attention and with distant family members and friends coming over to visit your place, the last few days before the festival would keep you extremely busy. Therefore, it is wise to start early.

Get rid of the clutter: Christmas is a time when even the most spacious of all homes can start feeling a little cramped. Having a house full of guests, visitors, and gifts can suddenly make you gasping for more space. There is no fun in living at a place where you cannot walk without bumping into furniture or a guest. Rather than offering a welcoming space, it can seem unfit for any kind of celebration.

Although it doesn’t imply that you start on major renovation spree, but you can certainly do something about it. Start with taking a look at the rented home in an objective manner and figure out the objects, piece of furniture whose absence wouldn’t make much difference. Evaluate every item on the basis of its requirement and you will be surprised at your own discovery. There will be plenty of items that can be discarded or at least removed for the time being.

Clean the place inside out: The next obvious step is to clean each nook and corner of your home. Most of us do not engage in deep cleansing exercises on the pretext of less availability of time. The fact that it is Christmas time and soon your home will be swarming with guests gives ample reason to have everything look at its best. Whether it is carpet and the upholstery or cupboards and attics, make sure to leave nothing without one round of deep cleansing.

 

The fireplace and Christmas tree are the main center of attraction

 and therefore require more attention

The fireplace: To ensure your own safety as well as of your guests give special attention to the fireplace and the surrounding area. Install a screen in front of the fireplace so as to keep the sparks from flying towards the people sitting beside it. Also keep removing the ashes regularly as they also present a fire hazard. Clean the chimney and hearth and remove any trace of old fuel. Use of dried woods is recommended instead of gasoline or any other highly inflammable liquid to start the fire. 

The Christmas tree: In addition to the fireplace, the Christmas tree will be another center of attraction in your home. There are two options in this regard. Either you can choose an artificial tree, in which case it should be fire-resistant or you can go for a live tree, the freshest of the lot on which you can lay your hands.   A good way of identifying a fresh Christmas tree is that the leaves are green needles that are hard to pull from the branches and should not break when you bend them between the fingers. The placement of the tree is also important. To be on the safer side keep it away from the fireplace and heating vents. Water it regularly to keep the tree as fresh as possible.

Saurabh Tyagi is a new media enthusiast with professional experience as a blogger. He keeps an eye on the top real estate trends across the country and pens his thoughts for leading online publications on topics related to career, technology and real estate.

 

Read more...