Free stuff from Perdue and Crayola
The folks at Perdue and Crayola are sponsoring a contest to encourage family togetherness at dinnertime. There are some great prizes, including a cruise package, a year’s supply of Perdue fully cooked chicken, and a prize package of Perdue and Crayola products. To enter, just visit http://www.perdue.com/familyfun and submit a picture of your family having fun at dinner!
To sweeten the offer even further, Perdue has given me FIVE full-value coupons good for family packages of chicken nuggets (valued at $7.99 each!) I’ll choose winners on Monday morning– with five coupons, the odds of winning should be pretty good! So enter to win by commenting below and telling me what you do to make dinner time fun for your family. For a second entry, blog about this contest with a link back here, then come back and comment again with a link to your blog. Good luck!
I’d love to win a coupon!
Me too!
I try to add a special surprise touch – like buying fortune cookies the night I made Chinese food for dinner. Sometimes just eating in a new location is fun.
Thanks for the giveaway! I’d love to win!
Dinner’s supposed to be fun? I thought the goal was just to get them to eat it? Just kidding, kind of! I do like to talk with the kids, and I like to make different foods and find new things they like. But I have to be honest, I don’t strive for “Fun”, I’m striving for family conversation + teaching manners + hearing what happened to everyone–We always share something good that happened to each of us. If I served chicken nuggets (which I do every once in awhile), THAT the kids would think is fun!
I need a quick meal solution for baseball nights!
We love to invite friends over for dinner for a FUN but rare treat!
Every so often, we have a “floor picnic.” I put an old sheet on the floor of the living room, and we all pile on and have a picnic, usually while watching a fun movie!
When the weather is nice we let our two middle girls sit outside on the back porch in lawn chairs with TV trays. Then my husband drapes a dish towel over his arm and pretends to be a waiter while I play short-order cook. They love feeling pampered and the best part is it was all his idea!
um, we’re not having fun here at mealtimes. I didn’t know we were supposed to. My kids do love to have picnics, though, outside or on the living room floor. okay, reading the comment above mine reminds me of the one time I took their orders and they thought it was so great! I really need to be more fun.
We’re still working on making mealtime fun w/ our 3.5yo and 1.5yo boys. We’re working on getting the oldest to tell us about his day, etc….I love some of the other ideas for when they get a bit older
Thanks for the chance to win!
We always go around the table and each person tells their favorite thing they did that day. My five and four year old boys love telling us what they liked best about the day.
I almost always have a candle on the table for special ambience or we eat outside on the back porch when the weather’s nice! Thanks!
We make dinner time fun by all eating together with no tv or radio on. Just us talking.
We do “Hit and Miss”. Hit is somethng good that happened for the day, miss is something that didn’t work out like you thought and how it could be better the next time. We always try to sit down together every night!
We eat in the living room and talk.
We just sit together at the table and talk about the day while we eat.
Sukyee
sukyee28@yahoo.com
We all sit together and try to have a conversation about our day. I say try because our kids are 3 years and 5 months, so some nights are more successful than others.
We like to go for the “triple whammy” – making dinner more special and relaxed, getting exercise before it gets dark, and encouraging our son to try new vegetables – by having appetizers before our meal. I prepare some type of vegetable based horderves (sounds classier when you call them that). When my husband arrives home from work, and we’re all stressed and starving, we happily munch on our appetizer while we get changed into our exercise clothes. After a walk, we come home destressed and ready for a leisurely family meal.
Family meals are our time to share about our day. My kids tell their dad what they are learning in “school” (we homeschool). To change things up and have fun, we sometimes play a game or have a question of the day. Thanks for the chance to win!
I try to have a salad or vegetable as an appetizer. That way I can relax knowing they’ve eaten at least a little bit of green! That make dinner more enjoyable for everyone
I wish our meals were fun but I settle for somewhat “together” and before dark most days…
Wow! What a cool giveaway…well, I am not sure if it is fun, but dinnertime is a time that I use for read alouds…I usually finish my food and then spend time reading a chapter (or ten…denpending on what we are reading) while everyone else is eating. I feel very blessed that we are able to eat dinner together every night…I know that that will not always be the case, so I am really treasuring it right now!
C~
This contest actually gave me a new idea on how I can make dinnertime fun for my 4 year old…I am going to buy some posterboard, cut down to the size of placemats and have my boy start decorating his own placemats with his Crayola art supplies!
Thanks for the inspiration!
Sometimes I try to do theme dinners for holidays. Like St. Pats we will have some irish and green foods. The kids think it’s fun!
We use bright place mats, cups, plates, etc. and have our little ones help set the table (they think it is great fun–don’t ask me why!) We each share a good thing/ bad thing that happened that day. And recently I discovered Obento, or Bento. Which is the Japanese version of a boxed lunch–a balanced meal that is also fun and cute to eat. Emphasis on the fun! : )
Most nights it’s just a means to an end – get food in their bellies. However, on Friday nights, that is our family game/fun night. We spend a little time before dinner cleaning up the main living area, then we eat pizza or something else that everyone loves and bring on the games or movie or whatever activity we’ve chosen for the night. It’s a blast and it really makes us slow down and appreciate our children.
We talk about our day and try to connect. Its hard having a 14 yr old and 4 yr old, things are very different between the two so we try to make it family time
Once a month I let each child ( i have 3 ) choose what they want to have for dinner and they get to help me make it.
Most evenings, we do “’round the table”. One of our kids picks a topic (like the best thing that happened today, something we should do this weekend or even math facts), and then we go around the table and share. BTW, math facts is actually one of the most popular ones — we take turns asking math facts to the person on our left or right. We have a lot of fun and it makes meal time special. Thanks for the great giveaway!!
I don’t know if we do anything that counts as extra-special, other than just being together at the table, which is special by itself
. Sometimes, the person who puts the napkins at the table will hide them under the plate or placemat or, if they were forgotten til last minute, will put them on the persons’ heads as they pass them out. We’re a bit strange 
.
It is always fun because daddy just got home from work! We take time sharing about our day and always have dessert – usually fruit.
It’s not been very fun lately with trying to eat while feeding the 9 month old. We do very much enjoy the quality family time since we’re all out all day.
Well, with a 16 year old, almost-4-year-old, 2 year old and one on the way, dinner is usually a rushed hurry with more teaching and correcting than fun being had! Once in a while we do eat outside and believe it or not, they little ones really think thats fun!
Having grown up eating dinner together as a family, it is something that I enjoy doing just about every night of the week, unless DH is traveling. It is a time for conversation and getting to know how everyone’s day went. It is also a time for sometimes heated discussions about world events. I love dinner time with my family. It’s one of my favorite times of day.
We like to read family devotional stories together before leaving the table, something with a good lesson. The kids love answering the questions at the end of the story.
we sing our blessing/prayer at the beginning of our meal.
Two words…Theme Night! At least once a week, usually a “Kids Choice” meal. The kids go all out even using stuff from around the house!
I have to feed our 1 year old before Daddy comes home or else he is way too cranky. When Daddy comes home, he snacks and gives our son bits of food to eat as well. We are starting to institute a “second dinner” where all of us sit down, this is really more of a bedtime snack for my son, but it means all of us at the table together.
We actually eat together in the living room……….usually with the TV on, but I have found that my kids share more and we find common ground than if we just sit around the table………it works for us and is stress free!
Would love to win! We try to plan at least one night per week when everyone is home. With 4 kids in a variety of sports and activities, coming and going, it’s a little harder to plan.
Fun for us is the treat of a special dessert or of chocolate syrup in their milk.
We have fun making dinner…the family has one goal-get dinner on the table!! We are forced to work together, most days we enjoy this. Sitting as a family at the end is the bonus.
We eat together most nights of the week – so we enjoy talking over the day. And sometimes when I’m focusing on manners, I’ll come up with rewards for those who are well-mannered (like pennies or dimes or earning dessert rewards.). Most of the time, it’s just talking and listening to the kids and their crazy selves!
We like to have “Fire pit Fridays”, when we can. We eat out by the fire pit, cook hotdogs and roast marshmallows. If it’s cool we enjoy hot chocolate too.
When I was growing up my mom helped us kids remain interested in the dinnertime with little things like allowing us to use the fancy dishes now and then or letting us choose our own napkin rings to use. Combined with her effort to get us kids into the kitchen and helping to prepare the food, it made me feel like we were part of preparing and sharing the meals together as family. I’d like to nurture that feeling when I have kids in the future.
We use dinner time to catch up on what happened during the day. Everyone gets a chance to tell about something. I would love the coupon I am working on reducing our food budget.
We do “favorite” and “not so favorite” of the day. It gives us a glimpse into events that we might not hear about otherwise.