The Health Beet: Easter Basket

Does your Easter Bunny need a basket makeover?

What does the typical children's Easter basket look like? Plastic eggs, little yellow chicks with the wired feet, maybe a stuffed animal bunny and LOTs of candy....lets take the most popular Easter candy that a child might consume on Easter day, a small box of peep chicks, a Reese's peanut butter egg, one Cadbury Creme Egg, one small bag of jelly beans and a bite off a chocolate bunny's ear.....in total, that is 109 grams of sugar...the same amount of sugar in almost 10 glazed doughnuts......who wants to be with their kids after 10 glazed sugar doughnuts?

Your Easter bunny can choose a healthier basket for your children with no synthetic food dyes, artificial sweeteners or flavorings, processed sugar or trans fats.

Here are some ideas for goodies to put in plastic eggs in your basket:

Annie's Organic bunny crackers...on sale at Whole Foods this week!

Available at most grocery stores and come in different flavors

Quarters or $2 bills

Dried fruit and nuts

Stickers

Tattoos

Legos

Pretzels

Baby carrots....a special treat from the big bunny

Other ideas for the basket:

Bubbles

Scented markers and coloring pages
iTunes gift cards

Children's magazines

Jumprope
Flavored Lip Balms

Gift cards to their favorite store

Water balloons

DVD's

Books on summer vacation destinations

Amazon.com has lots of kid friendly maps of different cities around the world

Sidewalk chalk

Matchbox cars

Cutie clementines

Character bandaids

Tom's children's toothpaste....comes in fun flavors like mango and strawberry

Bubble bath packets

Small packets of nut butters....they come in different flavors and are on sale now at the Natural Grocers and Whole Foods

Green Ideas:

Seed packets.....pick up some butterfly attracting plant seeds like Common Milkweed.

A Monarch butterfly on Common Milkweed

Small starter plants like strawberry,tomato or herbs.

Your kids can nurture their plants and see the fruits of their labor

For Easter grass use shreds from your paper shredder...traditional Easter grass is not recyclable and can be toxic to our pets.

If your bunny wants to take baby bunny steps and can't go cold turkey on the candy....try a couple of chocolate covered strawberries, dark chocolate nuts, or Annie's gummy bunnies.

Happy Easter!

Thanks for all the support! I am so happy to announce that I am working on my first e-book that will be a lot like my blog, kid friendly recipes for the entire family and fun tidbits to make our lives a little healthier.

I heard so many great comments from the last post, Green Smoothies, and so glad your kiddos are loving their delicious drinks....and their veggies...shhhhh.
Here are some of the comments I got:

My child has never consumed so much kale (unknowingly)

Our daughter kept asking for more green juice (really purple juice) and I was happy I could say YES!

So, I recently made the Produce Pops from your blog. I prepared the recipe as a smoothie instead of making Popsicles since the weather has not gotten too hot yet. I also added extra Kale just because I am mean to my children like that. Anyway, they LOVED the smoothie - sucked the entire blender down between the 2 of them. My son has never willingly eaten any vegetable so this is just a fantastic way to give them all those great nutrients without the fight. Here are some pics of the consumption!! Keep those great ideas coming!!

Tasha