Toddler Lunch Idea and Ode to Cookies

Okay, here's a recent lunch photo:

It's  sliced vegetables, vegetable dip, apple slices, string cheese, and letter cookies.

What I really want to talk about are the letter cookies.

Until I found the letter (and number) cookies at Trader Joe's, I was having a hard time teaching letters to Linus and Veda. It would seem that for all the reading we do, they just didn't see the fun in learning the letters of the alphabet. Puzzles were meh. The Leap Pad alphabet phonics toy on the refrigerator was meh.

So I bought these cookies, and we've made a game of it at lunch time. I pull a cookie out of the bin and ask what letter or number it is. They love it, and better yet, they're alphabet pros now.

Never underestimate the power of a cookie.