Backyard Fun: Mud Kitchen.

It’s been about two years since we invested in our mud kitchen and it’s still one of the best kids toy purchases we’ve ever made. It doesn’t matter the season — it get used anytime we’re out in the backyard! All the kids love it, and when they have friends over, it’s the main attraction. It’s my favorite, particularly, when 8 year old boys head over to the mud kitchen and play restaurant, house or family. 🙂

Even still, it’s fun to brighten up a favorite toy with some new embellishments! Enter: food rocks + recipe cards!

Mud Kitchen Food Rocks:

This spring, we spent time making mud kitchen food rocks to be used at the mud kitchen. Originally I was going to buy them off etsy or amazon but they were so expensive! And surprisingly, they were really easy to make. I bought river stones and acrylic paint pens and we got decorating! Once we were finished, I sprayed them with a clear sealant. I tried sticking to fruits and veggies on the rocks, but Javi’s french fries from McDonalds and his cupcake are two of my favorite rocks that were painted!

Recipe Cards:

The kids really love playing restaurant and taking food orders from each other. So I thought we could add some realism to their creativity by giving them some menus! After the menus, we moved onto recipe cards. I downloaded some “mud kitchen recipe cards” from etsy, printed and laminated them. Now they can make things like sunshine tea, leafy lasagna, petal pizza, stone salad, and snail stew! They smile and laugh as they search the yard for all the ingredients and then they’re so proud to hand deliver it to me as though I’m really going to eat it. 🙂

I haven’t decided what our next addition will be, but I’m leaning toward an outdoor dining table/chair set so that their restaurant patrons have somewhere to sit to enjoy their tasty imaginative creations!