Lunch In The Wild

A few weeks ago I noticed Muffin Tin Monday would be headed out and going AWOL but generally during the week Maddie and I stick close to home so daddy can use the car for work (much better on gas than the big ole SUV!) so I started thinking. I finally decided that we would do a whole safari day at home! I was hoping we could pitch our tent outside but the weather isn't to great today we transformed Maddie's bedroom.

So after Maddie woke up this morning I set to work turning her bedroom into an animal safari!

We pitched a tent, added a lantern, gathered some jungle friends, picked out a few animal books and spent the morning watching for wild animals!


I recently saw these nifty Popsicle stick puzzles popping up on the web and I thought today would be the perfect day for one! I taped together 7 Popsicle sticks and then drew a lion (oh how creative I am) to fit in with our animal theme today.

Maddie thought the puzzle was pretty cool (yeah!) and we built it a few times before she was ready to move onto something else.

Maddie is an animal lover so we happen to have a great abundance of small plastic animals which brought us to our next activity. I filled a small tub with Magic Nuudles (I didn't have any packing peanuts) and hid six jungle animals in the nuudles. Maddie used the kitchen tongs to dig out all of the animals. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Maddie LOVED this and wanted to do it over and over again!
When she was finally ready to move on we used the animals she found to make animal tracks with an ink pad. Thanks Allie for this great idea!


Of course stamping feet turned into stamping ears, trunks, tails, noses, backs.....and every other animal part!
We had to take a closer look with the magnifying glass.

While Maddie read her animal books I took care of making a Muffin Tin lunch fit for our animal friends.


Top: Ant on a log (raisins, celery & peanut butter), Banana for the monkeys, mixed nuts for the birds
Bottom: Leaves (mixed greens, ranch dressing and some hidden diced cucumbers!), Worms (hot dog curls), animal crackers

Maddie's favorite were the worms!

Maddie was shocked to find out that we would be eating lunch in the tent too!

We had an awesome time hanging out with our animal friends this morning but now it's time for mommy to get some housework done!