Child Central Station

I've been inspired yet again through the online community of early childhood educators and bloggers. The collection of Mud Pie Kitchens provided by Jenny at Let the Children Play was AMAZING, and my brain immediately went to work.... what could our Mud Pie Kitchen look like? I knew I could get a jump start on it over the weekend, and I specifically went to look for Mud Pie Kitchen items at the yardsales and second hand stores. I also knew that I had some things that we could use already.



This is the kitchen we have used outdoors in the past. It has not been visited all that frequently:


Here is the start of our new outdoor- "MUD PIE KITCHEN":

Not much, but enough for a start. I found some wooden bowls and heavy duty wooden spoons and utensils at the yard sales. I had some pine cones and some wooden cookies lying around that I added to the mix. For now, a plastic utility shelf serves as our stove with wooden cookies for the hot plates. A couple of flower boxes are holding some sticks, small wooden cookies, and rocks we picked from the beach. I found the copper molds at Vinnies for super cheap, and the hanging baskets too. (The baskets were white, so I sprayed them with copper paint to match the molds.) Definitely a good start. We really didn't need to worry about adding any sand, as we put it right next to our sandbox... We had 19 tons of sand delivered, I think we will have enough for at least a few mud pies :).

Besides the sprinker, The kitchen area was really the only place visited in the back yard today:

I found it quite interesting that the "Mud Pies" created today were mudless, except for one child who decided to play with mud in a bucket:

The water was used to wash/rinse hands before cooking and eating. It was also used to wash the food before preparing it.

We certainly had quite a feast! You see, the wooden cookies that were used as the hotplates for the stove coverted into plates for serving and eating off of.

Playing in the yard was fun, but we needed a few more things for our kitchen. (We also needed to dry off after running through the sprinklers, so we took a walk to the park.)

We love living a block from the park. Under the trees, we found TREASURES!

We worked together to collect them in our bags:

When we were done, we walked back to the house. Then we dumped our bags and sorted the loot:

Come back for more updates as we continue to develop our Outdoor Mud Pie Kitchen!