Share ten tips and tricks to get your kids to eat more vegetables for a $30 Amazon.com gift card!

THANK YOU EVERYONE! We have reached our quota of 50 posts. We are reviewing current submissions to make sure they are qualified. You will be notified via email if you were one of the qualifying participants. Thanks for participating! Even if you are not in the first 50 submissions, you are welcome to continue submitting your posts, and we will share all of them with the team at Peas and Thank You.

We see it all the time, our kids sit down at the dinner table and don’t want to touch their veggies. After many painful meals, watching them hide or push their vegetables aside, it can drive us crazy. One of every mom’s most common questions is, “How do I get my kids to eat and enjoy their veggies?” Where does one turn to find creative, tasty recipes that every kid will love? We’ve teamed up with Sarah Matheny, author of “Peas and Thank You: Simple Meatless Meals the Whole Family Will Love,” to bring you a fun new blogging program and tons of refreshing, new veggie recipe ideas! Sarah’s delicious recipes are sure to be real crowd pleasers. We want to hear from you about your best tips and tricks are to get kids to love eating more veggies. Do you cut the veggies into interesting shapes? Do you jazz up your carrots and peas with special herbs to add a tasty zing to the dish? What are your favorite healthy sauces that get your kids asking for seconds? We are sure you’ll have some excellent tips, and can’t wait to read your blog posts!

Here are some great tips from Sarah to get your blog posts started and to get your kids eating healthy veggies!

Take your kids shopping. Familiarize your kiddos with the produce section and let them choose a veggie themselves based solely on what they think looks fun, but only if they promise to eat some. You may be surprised when they load asparagus or parsnips in the cart, but knowing that they got to pick it will make them excited to have some on their plate.
Warm ‘em up or cool ‘em down. While your children may not like raw broccoli, they may enjoy it lightly steamed. Roasted carrots may be too squishy, but they may love crunching into a raw baby carrot. Try new ways of preparation before writing off a veggie completely.
Keep their favorites on the side. At our house, we keep the fruit and yogurt off the table until we’ve eaten a fair amount of our veggies. This way they have a little incentive to graduate to their next course without feeling like we are bribing them with dessert.
Let them Build-Their-Own. We find a way to get the kids involved in making almost every meal, and give them a variety of veggies to add to their creation. I arrange small bowls of veggies all over the counter so the kids can make their own salad bowls, pasta bowls, rice bowls and wraps. It’s amazing what they’ll try when they get to add it themselves!
Get them sauced. Find a healthy sauce you approve of and that your kids enjoy and let them use it liberally. Dip, drizzle and mix it in and your kids will be eating veggies you never dreamed of.

We're looking for quality posts, so please read on.

How it works:
We are looking for fifty creative, original, high-quality and authentic blog submissions. Create an original post on your blog, in 400 words or more (using your own words), share ten tips and tricks to get your kids to eat more vegetables. Include a thoughtful introduction within the body of your post, and a conclusion. Be creative, but not with your spelling and grammar. You must also include the disclosure statement (below) in your post, tweet a link to your post with the campaign hashtag and follow the rest of the requirements below. We will review every post and select the first fifty qualifying submissions to receive a $30 Amazon.com gift card!

The blogging program begins July 27, 2011 and the submission window closes at 11:59pm PST on August 25, 2011. We will contact the qualifying bloggers on or about September 1, 2011. Full terms and conditions are posted for your review at http://reading.socialmoms.com/PT-terms.

Rewards for Participating:
The first fifty qualifying participants will receive a $30 Amazon.com gift card! See Terms and Conditions.

Requirements:
To participate, we ask that you:

Create an original blog post on your blog, in 400 words or more, sharing "10 tips and tricks to get your kids to eat more vegetables." Please include a thoughtful introduction and conclusion in addition to the ten tips in the main body of your essay. Give it plenty of thought and creativity and include content to engage your readers. Short or poorly written posts will not be accepted. Copying and pasting does not count. Blank posts submitted to create a blog link on the discussion page will be disqualified. Don't copy another blogger's post or ideas. Plagiarism is grounds for immediate disqualification.
Participants must include the following disclosure as a footnote of their post:
“I wrote this blog post while participating in the SocialMoms and Peas and Thank You blogging program for a gift card worth $30. For more information on how you can participate, click here.” (make sure you link to http://reading.socialmoms.com/PT-about)
Log on to your Twitter account, www.twitter.com, and send a tweet including a link to your blog post with the hashtag #peasandthankyou.
Return to www.SocialMoms.com and post a comment on this discussion page in the comments section below, including an active link to your blog post and a direct link to your Twitter tweet. (You can click on the date/time link below your tweet to get the direct link to your tweet.)

Eligibility:
No purchase required to participate. You must be a legal resident of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia, have a personal blog and be a registered user of the www.socialmoms.com and www.twitter.com websites to participate and at least 18 years of age or older at time of submission. See Terms and Conditions. Please see SocialMoms FAQs for more information on blogging programs.

About Peas and Thank You
Peas and Thank You is a collection of recipes and stories from a mainstream family eating a not-so-mainstream diet. It's filled with healthy and delicious versions of foods we’ve all grown up enjoying, but with a Mama Pea twist—no meat, lots of fresh ingredients and plenty of nutrition for growing Peas. From wholesome breakfasts to mouth-watering desserts, there’s plenty here to satisfy the pickiest Peas in your life. It’s easier than ever to whip up crowd-pleasing meals that will have the whole family asking for, “more, Peas.” Sarah Matheny's delicious recipes and entertaining stories draw hundreds of thousands of visitors to her blog, peasandthankyou.com each month, where she makes raising a vegetarian family easy and fun. She is the author of “Peas and Thank You: Simple Meatless Meals the Whole Family Will Love.”

Learn More about the book