Turkey Triumph

This week it was my turn to be a parent volunteer at preschool.  I wish I could do this every month.  Every parent gets one day each year, and I chose the month of November since it is my favorite time of year.  Thanks to Pinterest, I found a few cute ideas for a turkey themed visit to preschool 3's.

First up, snacks.  The threes are passionate about snacks, and the cuter the food, the better.

Max helped me assemble these.  We packaged them in little bags with ribbons to keep them fresh for the kids the next day.  This is obviously rather self explanatory, but in case you are interested in making them and have trouble making out the ingredients from my bad photos, here is a list of turkey parts...

Body - Double Stuff vanilla Oreos.  They have to be the double stuffs or the stick won't fit in the frosting.  If you buy the regular ones by mistake, you will be going back to the grocery store in 5:00 traffic wearing your house slippers to buy the double stuffs.  Then you will have an extra package of regular oreos waiting around.  This might not turn out to be the worst problem of your week.

Head - Miniature Nutter Butter

"Glue" - White frosting that comes in a squeeze pouch (use for tail feathers too)

Tail and Beak - Candy Corn, which Walmart will be sold out of because it's officially Halloween candy.  Go ahead and hit THREE stores if you need to, because surely you are committed to having a cute snack for three year olds to devour in seven seconds.

Waddle - Squeeze a glob of that frosting into a dish and mix it up with some red food coloring, then put that in a zip lock, cut one corner out of the baggie, and "pipe" on a waddle.  Gotta get your waddle on. It's no turkey without the waddle.

Eyeballs - Look for these in the cake decorating section of your local super store or craft store.  Yes, money really can buy you anything these days.

Viola!  Cute, but I hesitate to mentally tally up what I spent in order to make this happen.  I do have left over ingredients, so these may make an appearance on the kids' Thanksgiving table this year.

Now it was time to prepare the craft, and while I tidied up from the snack and ate a few Oreos, I enlisted help.  After much (MUCH) debate (pilgrim masks?  paper bag cornucopias? pumpkins?  feathered headdresses?) I settled on the ever popular pine cone turkey for our craft.

When you live in the burbs, it should be noted, you actually have to go BUY pine cones.  So sad.

The Old Buzzard was asked to cut beaks from orange fun foam.  The Old Buzzard is a willing participant in my crazy craft schemes, but as we already established with the turkey derby car, I like things done a certain way.

Including my beaks.

This was what he gave me first round.  Turkey?  Or hummingbird?

Yes, that Buzzard was called back to the fun foam and ordered to perform beak reduction surgery.

....and this is what I got next.

I am telling you, good craft help is really, really hard to find.

Anyway, we successfully assembled eight pine cone turkeys in preparation for the kids to give them tails.  I thought it would be helpful to hot glue the head parts together ahead of time, but now I wish I would have let them put the facial features on with tacky glue.  I think they could have managed that, and it would have been even cuter to have crooked little faces done by the children.

We googled and learned that a group of turkeys is called a...

covey,

rafter,

or a gobble!

Did you know that??

(Actually, we just SPOKE and asked Buzzard's new iphone, and the iphone SPOKE back to us and have us the answer.  I'm still confused about how technology gets me a voice on the line, let alone a phone that physically answers my questions.  Crazy!)

Anyway, the gang/covey/rafter/gobble's all here awaiting a big field trip to preschool where they will be "tailed and feathered"!  Ha!  (Yes, I put Pointy Hummingbird up front. I wouldn't dare set him behind someone.)

Gluing away while I read library books about turkeys.

Me and the little workers.

Ta Da!  Finito!