Vegetables in Space!

Wondering when I'm going to post about B's birthday parties? This is the first of a couple highlighting little bits to remember.

One of my favorite random space things I thought of for his second party was creating all the planets out of fruits and vegetables.  This came to me while pondering a mothering conundrum.  You see, B wanted to have corn dogs for his birthday party.  I'm OK with that, but suspected that the grown-ups would appreciate having a few other and perhaps healthier choices.  At his family party we'd had a sun, of sorts, made out of baby carrots arrayed around the ramekin with dip in it.  This, plus some thoughts about eating all our colors daily led to the below planetary array of fruits and vegetables.  Better still, I got to relax and leave the assembly largely to the kids!  I put my type A personality to the side as well as Brent's literal views on the colors of the planets and much creativity and tasty snacking ensued:

Mercury: Orange
Venus: Cauliflower and yellow bell pepper strips
Earth: Frozen blueberries and broccoli florets
Mars: Cherry tomatoes and red bell pepper strips
Jupiter: (HUGE) pile of baby carrots, strips of red peppers and a cherry tomato "spot"
Saturn: Broccoli, celery, yellow pepper strips, green bell pepper strips forming the "rings"  (We decided to make Saturn mostly green, my apologies to astronomers)
Uranus: 1/2 a red cabbage
Neptune: Blueberries

(We did not make Pluto, in part because it is now only "planet-like" but also because I'd been pondering making it out of mushrooms and one of our guests was allergic.  We do really like Pluto and it was part of the other decorations, but our vegetable planetary array did not include our planet-like friend).

Frozen blueberries were by far the favorite of all small people.  Word to the wise though, while they are incredibly delicious, they are also incredibly messy!