How Kiwi Crate saves my sanity

One of my favorite blogs that I started following when H was younger is Weelicious.  A lot of what she blogs about is cooking for and with kids, but she also gives great tips on new and different products.  A few months ago she posted about Kiwi Crate and gave a promo code to try it out for half off.  I thought it looked good and decided to give it a try.  It was almost summer vacation and I thought it would be good to have some projects to keep us busy.  For the most part my kids get along, but on those crazy out of control days it's nice to have something set aside that I know will keep us all busy for a little while. 

Kiwi Crate is a monthly service that you sign up for.  Each month for $20, a box gets delivered to you and inside is 2 related projects.  The materials are very well made and stand up well to both my kids.  You can pay an additional $7.95 per month for extra materials if you have more than one child, although we've never needed the extras.  K is usually able to participate and make her own project.  H is always super excited when he sees we have a new box delivered.  This month's crate was Farmer's Market.

The 2 projects this month were My Colorful Harvest and My Market Apron.  Each project comes with their own instruction booklet and lets you know how much parent participation is required. That really helps you plan which one you should tackle first, and if you'll have to split the box up into 2 separate days (which we did with this one).  

We decided to work on the Colorful Harvest project first.  The materials given were fruit and vegetable/fruit fabrics, yarn laces, cotton balls, green felt, pipe cleaners, and stencils.  In our first box we ever received they provided child safe scissors which were optional for this project, as was a pencil.

The first step was choosing a vegetable/fruit fabric and lacing it almost all around, leaving a small space to stuff with cotton balls.

K stuffing her apple piece with the cotton balls and H lacing his eggplant piece.

After the pieces were laced and stuffed we finished them off with more lacing cut leaf shapes out of the green felt.  We used the pipe cleaners to attached the leaves to the top of each piece.

The finished products.  This was a fun activity to keep us busy on a day where we stayed home.  We didn't get to the other project, which was to paint on an apron and pretend to work at a Farmer's Market selling your fruits and vegetables.  The crate came with paper money for the customer.

I'm so impressed with the amount of materials that comes with each crate.  Kiwi Crate also emails you extension activities that vary with each crate.  This is a definite sanity saver for parents, especially ones who have more than one kid at home!