Krista, Author at While He Was Napping

January 9, 2013 by Krista

Idaho Tacos

I posted this waaay back when this blog was brand spanking new, nearly two and a half years ago. So, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to revisit it with a little update. After all it is, still, one of our regulars. A tasty mix of baked potatoes and taco toppings. Yum.

IDAHO TACOS

Ingredients:
– Baked Potatoes (Enough for your family)
– Sliced olives
– Sour cream
– Steamed Broccoli
– Shredded cheese
– Shredded lettuce
– Diced tomatoes
– Sliced mushrooms
– Ground hamburger
– Salsa
– Sliced Green Onions
– Cheese Sauce
– Any other taco toppings you enjoy (yes, taco toppings)

Directions:
1. Wash and wrap your potatoes like you normally would for a baked potato – Wrapped in foil, 450F, 45ish minutes.
2. Chop, slice, dice and in any other way prepare the toppings. Steam the broccoli, slice the mushrooms, ect. We put each topping in it’s own bowl and then everyone adds what they want to their potato.
3. When the potatoes are tender (stab it with a fork or knife) take them out of the oven and unwrap the foil. Top with your prepared taco toppings.
4. Serve. We always do buffet style. Everyone gets just what they want.

It may sound a little weird… but I promise it’s delish! And way easy, right? It’s a meal Mr. Napping enjoyed growing up and brought to our little family when we married. They used to say (okay, they still do) that “if you have to go back for seconds or can’t finish your firsts, you didn’t make it right.” It took me a few tries to get what they meant, but it’s so true. You can eat just a bit or fill up like a king, depending on how much of the toppings you put on your potato. Try it, I dare you… Enjoy!

This post was written by Krista and originally appeared on While He Was Napping.

January 8, 2013 by Krista

{Project GO-FO} Toy Rotation – Step Two: The Divide

If you missed the first part of the toy rotation system I’m implementing, get all caught up on The Sort and then come back here.

Okay, when I left you yesterday, I had just sorted out all the toys I could find in our house into categories. The categories were physical/motor skill toys, imaginative/fantasy play toys, constructive play toys, games/toys with rules, and constant circulation toys. I also had a few toys in the Wow! factor category that will be saved for a rainy day.

When we parted yesterday, we had this…

A big ole’ mess, right?

Well, when we get done today we will have something more like this:

Awwwwww… big sigh of relief. Much better.

Here’s the How:

1. I took each bin and wrote a number on it. Then I grabbed a little notebook and labeled one page for each bin.

2. I set the first bin in the middle of the room and then took all the toys in my Wow! factor pile and set them in the bin. Bin #1 is our rainy day bin that contains toys that my kids like, but don’t love. The toys they play with for a while, but not ones that they ask for.

3. Next, I took another bin and placed it in the middle of all my piles. Then I took a toy or two (or three… or four…) from each of my separated piles and placed it in the bin. I wrote down each toy as it went in so that I had a complete list of the contents. That way, if my kids ask for any specific toys, I can get them back out without having to unpack three different bins to find it.

4. I repeated step three until the large majority of our toys were packed away in one of the bins. I left out one basket of toys for Monkey and one basket for Gator.

5. Then, THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP, after the kids went to bed, I took the toy bins out to the garage. You know the adage, ‘out of sight, out of mind’? Monkey helped me put the toys in the bins, so he knew where they were and while he could see them, he kept wanting to take the toys back out. Once they bins were gone, he stopped wanting to unpack them all.

6. Take the toys that are in-rotation and set up a storage system for them. I chose to use fabric boxes I found at Dollar Tree. Label each basket or bin so that your kids can easily put them away in the right places when they finish with them. This allows them to pull out more than one basket at a time and still be able to put them away correctly. I use photo labels with Monkey – since he’s three and can’t read yet – and he does great with them. I love that I don’t have to worry about him dumping out multiple bins and things still get stored in an orderly manner.

The first week we did our rotation, I made a list of the toys Monkey asked for each day and then retrieved them while he was asleep. Because of my lists, it was really easy. I just retrieved the toy and crossed it off the list. They will be a part of our constant circulation toys that stay inside all the time. If he missed them enough to ask for them specifically, he probably plays with them enough to be worth keeping them inside. We added about a dozen toys to our constant circulation toys, but that wasn’t bad since I had kept so little inside to begin with.

So, we are about two weeks into this and, so far, it’s going well. My boys are playing with their toys more. And, better yet, they play together more! I have to do a little more refereeing, but only because Monkey forgets he’s bigger than Gator. I love what this system is doing for my boys, and I love that I have fewer toys laying around my house! SCORE! And on to my next project….

This post was written by Krista and originally appeared on While He Was Napping.
If you’d like to get more While He Was Napping, you can find me here:

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January 7, 2013 by Krista

{Project: GO-FO} Toy Rotation – Step One: The Sort

If you missed the intro to Project: Get Organized- Find Order I’ll break it down for you real quick. Basically, instead of a New Year’s Resolution, I set a theme for the next year – this year. The theme: Get organized and find some order for our chaotic lives. Just in time for this new goal, Stephanie at Modern Parents Messy Kids has released an awesome e-book. Project Organize Your Entire Life: The Quick Start Guide is chock-full of amazing tips, tricks and pointers on where to start and how to wrangle a wild home. This is exactly what I needed. I have grandiose ideas, but often get burn out before I do much more than make a bigger mess. Not so with POYEL: The Quick Start Guide. It goes section by section and step by step. Perfect! She even talks about two kinds of home overhauls: the slow start or the big clean. With my two boys, I’ll be taking the slow route and working during nap times and after bedtime.

The first section is all about toy rotation. We need this BADLY at my house. So, here we are. Step one. The toy sort. This actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. It took a little longer than I anticipated, but that was mostly because I kept getting interrupted with other things. And having two curious little “helpers” didn’t actual help. Sure my piles didn’t look so much like piles at times, but we got through the sort phase. Here’s how:

THE TOY SORT

1. Okay, I will admit that the very first thing I did was start breaking rules laid out in POYEL. I bought my storage containers before I actually knew exactly what I needed to buy. But, this rule-breaking actually helped me A LOT! I had five bins for toy storage, giving us – in theory – a six-week rotation of toys. If it didn’t fit in one of the bins, it needed to leave our home. Simple as that.

2. I had to decide how exactly I wanted to organize all our toys. There’s a great article at MPMK that talks about two kinds of toys. The kind that your kiddos love to pieces and the kind that hold their attention for a passing moment. Obviously, the ideal kind is the first kind. But, the second kind has it’s value, too. Consider this: It snowed non-stop for three days, the temperature has been sitting in single digits for the past week and your kids are bouncing off the walls and you’re all going stir-crazy. But wait, what’s this?! A box of long-forgotten about toys sitting in the garage?! Pay dirt for your little typhoons, am I right? It’s like Christmas with so many new-to-their-attention-span play things. So, maybe think twice before you cast out all those shiny and passing toys. I designated one of my bins as our Woo and Wow! toy bin. It’ll be stashed for rainy days.

I did a little research and found a great article on different kinds of play that children engage in from Child Development Institute. After reading about the five different types of play, I decided to divide our toys into categories.

– Physical/Motor Skill Toys. These toys are puzzles, balls, the Geo-Board, magnets my boys play with on the fridge, our Aqua-Doodle and the like.

– Constructive Play Toys. These toys are blocks, Legos, our new Gizmo set, Monkey’s felt road and his wooden train set and other things that my boys actually build with.
– Fantasy Play Toys. Dress up clothes, cars and trucks, tool set, our LeapFrog shopping cart, ect. Toys that can be played with in a variety of ways.
– Games or Toys with Rules. This includes Chutes and Ladders, Candy Land, Jenga, the bean bag toss and the like.
– Constant Circulation Toys. These are the toys that will never go into storage. The things my boys really, really love. Monkey has a couple of stuffed animals that he would definitely notice if they went MIA. They will always be out. As will some of his cars. The kid loves those cars.

Each category got it’s own pile and I gathered every toy in the house I could find. I will probably still find toys around, or even piece of different toys, but that’s why I like the 20 gallon totes. It’s super easy to open them back up and reunite any stray pieces…

I’ve got more for you! Get all the info on dividing and storing the toys in Toy Rotation: The Divide.

This post was written by Krista and originally appeared on While He Was Napping.
If you’d like to get more While He Was Napping, you can find me here:

January 4, 2013 by Krista

Weekend Wander #107

Hi, Everybody. I hope your holidays were merry, bright, shiny and happy! As for me, I have finally come down with the cold Mr and Gator were suffering with over Christmas. And I thought taking care of two rambunctious boys while I was healthy was an exhausting feat! I’ve been doing my own napping during nap time and not a whole lot more. You should see my house…. I’ll just say our Christmas tree is still up (it’s artificial) and leave it at that. Eek, right?!

This week’s feature… well, it’s a little self-centered. But, hopefully, you can benefit from it too… I’d like to point you to the Ready for Romance Series for some fun valentine ideas. It’s coming faster than you might think.

Well, let me see what you’ve been up to this first week of a new year. I hope yours has been a lot better than my week…

Link ’em up! Annnnd….. GO!

This post was written by Krista and originally appeared on While He Was Napping.
If you’d like to get more While He Was Napping, you can find me here:

January 3, 2013 by Krista

{Pin Testing} Making Bouncy Balls

This was a project from our Science Experiments & Art Projects Book that I made Little Monkey for his last birthday. Okay, let me say this up front, I didn’t expect much with experiment and was hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

We found the directions HERE and HERE. They are the same directions at both links for the most part, just FYI. Little Monkey helped me make our ball and my mom and sister each made one too. Little Monkey and I used glitter glue, my mom used Elmer’s White Glue-All, and my sister used Elmer’s Blue Gel glue.

The balls were even less bouncy than I anticipated. It was kind of disappointing. We also didn’t put them in baggies. I wanted to see just how hard they would get. Little Monkey ripped them apart the next day before they were completely dry, so… I don’t know how hard they would get if they’d dried completely. They made better marbles than bouncy balls though. Although the experiment didn’t work out like we were hoping, the balls were still pretty fun to play with anyway. We used them as marbles and rolled them down a racing road toy Little Monkey has. We will probably revisit this project and see if we can figure out where we blundered. Or just make more marbles…

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