iPad Pizza

I've had several friends visit lately who have been quite impressed by my "iPad Pizzas" I made for the kids. I had a tea party last week (that's right, I had an olde fashioned tea party and ACTUALLY USED MY TEA POT- cool right? It was a wedding gift and hadn't ever been used!) and all the moms took photos of the iPad Pizzas with their phones and specifically asked me to blog about it. So, I guess I better not disappoint.

I'm not much of an enforcer when it comes to screen time. I personally love TV, and we have the TV on a lot, as background noise. My kids barely pay attention to it. If they zoned out and just started at it and didn't play, I'd likely take a different stance. But as it is, we watch a lot of TV. But it's different when it comes to iPad and Xbox. Little Man was just introduced to the Xbox at Christmas, when he was given Skylanders as a gift (Side note: best and worst game ever. I'll blog about it another day.) We have a lot of educational games on the iPad, but I don't like to see them sitting on their butts for hours staring at a screen. With this in mind, we decided on a "one hour per day" rule (that's combined, iPad or Xbox). I thought this would fix all our problems (haha on me) until I tried to enforce it.

The problem with little kids is that they can't tell time. They have very little concept of time. What's five minutes vs one hour to them, right? So whenever I told the kids their hour was up, or they had 10 minutes left, or whatever, they got upset. Fights ensued. Chaos reigned. I tried timing the hour on the oven timer, like we do for taking turns with fought over toys, but they would be unprepared for the end, and not want to stop playing, or they would not use all their time in one sitting, and I'd have to keep track of who had how much time left. They would disagree with my calculations. Fights ensued. Chaos reigned.

Then one day, in a fit of frustration, I sat Little Man down and we drew a pizza on a piece of paper. I said, "Imagine an hour is a whole pizza. If it's cut in four, each slice is 15 minutes. You get four pizza slices per day." We stuck that crude pen-on-back-of-old-grocery-list pizza to the wall with painters tape and that was how we started timing the screen time. Whenever one of them wants the iPad or Xbox, they have to ask me for it. I start the timer for 15 minutes (oven timer, iPhone, whatever). When the timer ends, we remove a pizza slice from the pizza, and they have the option of using another slice, or stopping. I later spiced up the pizzas, made one for each of them, made them more colourful and nicer looking, seeing as they are now a permanent fixture on my living room wall. I also switched from painters tape to velcro for easy on/off of the slices. This is a good place for me to gush about my Cricut cutter. I LOVE my Cricut! Every moms best friend is a machine that cuts perfect little characters and letters for making kid-friendly items. Now if only it also made coffee...

iPad Pizzas are really easy to make. Here's the directions in case you need some guidance to get started:

You will need:

• Large piece of bristol board as your background
• Smaller piece of bristol board for your pizza (you could use construction paper too, but I like the extra sturdiness of bristol board when it's something the kids are peeling on and off repeatedly by themselves)
• Adhesive backed velcro
• Letters (you can write free hand, get sticker letters, stencils, or use your awesome Cricut machine- whatever you choose, the world is your oyster) These are my favourite:

• Markers

What you do:

Use something to trace a big circle. I used a dinner plate. Trace it on the large bristol board and on the small bristol board. Cut out the small one. Cut the small circle into four. Use a marker to draw dividing lines on the large bristol board to show the pizza in four. I coloured each slice on the large board a different pattern. Just because I felt like it. Stick velcro to the backs of the slices, stick velcro in the right spot on the large board (you want your slices to line up with your pizza outline on the large board when you stick them on). Add more velcro to the side of the large board so you have somewhere to stick the used slices. I used letters to add the kids' names, tried to make it purdy, you know the drill.

It's really straight forward to make, all you needed was the idea. Good luck and enjoy!