Whimsical Adventures of a Magical Mom: Winter School Snack

Yesterday was such a nice, normal day... until I looked at Knight's kindergarten agenda for this week and realized that it was his turn to bring in the class snack... TODAY! Yikes! Now, I'm not the kind of mom that throws a bag of chips and some M&M's at my kid's classroom (Although, if you're a working mom, and that's all you have time for, then you go girl!). Because I stay at home and generally have some free time to plan these things, I try to do something special.

Like this bad boy!

So, a few hours of frantic Googling later, I had it! Rice Krispie Snowmen! Now, the ones I saw were perfect little sculptures, nicely stacked and decorated. Well, in the words of an internet meme, "Ain't nobody got time for that!" I found a snowman cookie cutter and some pre-made Rice Krispie bars at the store. Some licorice rope for scarves, orange Starburst to cut into noses, and chocolate shell to paint the hats brown, and I was set. That is, until I got home and realized that the pre-made bars were only as long as the first two sections of the snowman cookie cutter... Ooooooh great.

Somethin' ain't right.

With some quick reconfiguring, I cut the bottom part out first, then used the top of the cutter to extract 2 heads from each of the remaining bars. It's a good thing they're so sticky! With just my can-do attitude, I did a reverse decapitation on each and every one of those 24 snowmen. I then dripped a little bit of chocolate shell on the hats, and stuck them in the fridge overnight to harden the chocolate and "set" the heads onto the bodies a little better.

See? You can't even tell he began his life headless.

This morning, I woke up, helped Knight pick a toy for Show & Share, and had another fight with Dragon about his outfit. I wanted him to wear the shirt with a bear, he wanted the shirt with (what else?) a dragon. And he was willing to cry, whine, and fuss, for twenty minutes straight. Eventually, I caved and switched out his shirts, but that kid had cereal for breakfast! No crackers!

When I got back from dropping the kiddos at school, I pulled out the snowmen, chopped up the Starburst, and made scarves out of the licorice ropes by pulling each twist of 9 strands into 3 flat sections of 3 ropes each. I then cut those in half, and wound them around the snowmen's neck. I popped the noses on, and got each one of them into an individual bag. In a few minutes, I'll run them up to school. Hopefully, Knight's kindergarten class will enjoy them, and I won't get a critical review in the next school newsletter! Also, I take no responsibility for any trauma incurred by having a snowman's head pop off when taken out of the bag.