Blog Hopping with Tiny

Tiny is excited to be partnering with a variety of mommy bloggers, nutritionists, SLP/OT and other pros in her upcoming Blog Hop! 

We will all be writing about an assortment of important topics from our own unique viewpoints, to kick off 2015 with great ideas for an inspirational start to a happy new year!

Topics will include:

Monday, January 5

Tiny Tastes is all about helping children and families reach their full potential! 

What are your health goals for your family in 2015?

And what practical steps will you take to help reach them?

Monday, January 12

Tiny loves creative, easy, and healthy foods for kids!

Share some unique ideas for fun and nutritious foods that are simple enough for young children to help make in the kitchen. Also, your tips to help kids want to taste new things!

Monday, January 19

Tiny Tastes can inspire kids to taste things that they may not think they will enjoy.

Use the Tiny Tastes app with a child this week and describe your experience using it.  

Monday, January 26

Tiny was once nervous to open up Tiny’s World. Some kids are afraid to try new foods. Parents face a variety of struggles.

Describe a time that you were faced with a challenging new situation. How did you overcome the fears or challenges, and what happened when you stepped out of your comfort zone to do it?

Monday, February 2

Eating healthy food is awesome, and Tiny also enjoys doing healthy activities too!

What healthy activities do you enjoy doing with your family/children? How do you make healthy activities a priority in the midst of the rest of your family’s busy life?

Look forward to pooling thoughts and ideas from some wonderful people!

Visit us at TinyTastesWorld.com to learn more about Tiny Tastes, our app that can help young children have fun trying new foods!

We look forward to getting to know new friends through our Blog Hops... so please also message us if you'd like to stay in touch about future blogging opportunities, if these topics aren't specifically suited to your blog's theme this time around!

Tiny's On The Phone!

This is a big day for me... I've been waiting patiently for the development team to have this new app version ready for you! 
Tiny Tastes is now even more accessible to use -- since it has come available for phones! 
You can now download Tiny Tastes from the App Store for iPhone or at Google Play for Android phones.  


Yours,
Tiny


Visit us at www.tinytastesworld.com

Shhh... A Fun Surprise For Tiny!

Celebrate the holidays with Tiny! She will be so excited to receive a gift from your child. These sweet little surprise packages are now available to buy in the app's Tiny Shop.

While using the Tiny Shop, which contains lots of free items for Tiny to use in the app, it can teach children both the value of earning coins to save up enough to buy things for Tiny, as well as the value of sharing and buying things for someone else to use (for Tiny!) while your child experiences the joy of giving.

The app's Tiny Shop will always offer free items to shop for by using the coins your child earns while eating and drinking with the app. If you would also like to support Tiny Tastes and unlock new features within the app, you can buy things in the special Caregivers Store with your real App Store account to buy our secure in-app-purchases. More fabulous items will be coming out soon... so stay tuned on Facebook and on our blog to learn when new things come out to have even more fun with Tiny!

Visit us at www.tinytastesworld.com

Congratulations!

Congratulations to the winner of our Holiday Contest: Solveig Heide Koczak

We appreciated everyone's entries, and Tiny loved the pictures that were sent! Thank you all for your participation and we hope you're having a beautiful holiday season.

Visit us at Tiny Tastes World on FB to stay in touch with all the latest ~ 

We hope your family has fun trying new things together!

Visit us at www.tinytastesworld.com

Last Chance To Enter

Today is the last chance to join these kids in some Tiny fun! It's the last day to enter Tiny's Holiday Contest. Visit www.TinyTastesWorld.com to find out how you can win a kid's tablet in time for Christmas. 

Once you enter online, plug in to the extra chances to win using your child’s artwork on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter! Plus -- when you share Tiny's contest post from her Facebook page to your own, you will get 1 EXTRA contest entry!  

Please use our hashtags when entering the contest with your child's artwork: #tinytastesworld #tinytastesapp #healthykids

Contest runs through midnight tonight!

Visit us at www.tinytastesworld.com

Can't parents just model healthy eating?

I had an interesting conversation on Facebook about this topic today....

Someone asked me if I didn't think parents would be good enough candidates to model healthy eating -- i.e. why shouldn't we just let real-world role models do this for their kids, since we know that research has shown peer/parent modeling can be one effective way to help children eat more new healthy foods? 

I would definitely encourage parents to model healthy eating and to be good role models for positive food attitudes within their family (1). However, in reality this does not always translate into a child wanting to join along with them....

My reply was that I don't know of any equivalent modeling studies yet that specifically use cartoons who model positive eating behaviors. But the Tiny Tastes app concept is based on the widespread experience that we've consistently observed: the seemingly "magical" impact that cartoon characters and other media can have on influencing children's behaviors and learning in general. 

Tiny offers a very cute, neutral way to engage children, while still leaving it up to the child entirely to decide if he/she wants to join Tiny and eat along with her! 

For example, Tiny Tastes may be similar to the Popeye approach (2) where children are inspired to eat the same thing that they see modeled in front of them by a hero or animated "friend"! 

We also know that cartoon advertising of food products has an impact on a child's food preferences and intake amount. (3)  And also that healthy foods promoted in media are associated with a child's higher preference for those foods and vice versa. (4) 

Since we know that what children see on the Screen can really impact their food choices in a special way, why not harness the power of media/technology for good?

Tiny will invite your child to share their healthy foods with her through the app... and as they watch her enjoy the very same foods that are in their own meal, they can be inspired to join her by doing the same!

Visit us at www.tinytastesworld.com


(1) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15003137
(2) http://jhppl.dukejournals.org/content/30/5/803.short
(3) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002822301000128, http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/hea/28/4/404/
(4) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953607002730

Tiny Visits DC + Sees Obamas

Yesterday I visited lots of hospitals around the DC metro area to let them know about Tiny Tastes! I had meetings at:
- MedStar Georgetown Hospital
- Howard University Hospital
- Children's National Hospital
- and several other clinics along the way

My main goal was to stop by and say hello -- I love meeting new people! The doctors, feeding therapists, nutritionists, and child life specialists with whom I met in DC were full of compliments and questions... they were all so interested to learn about the new Tiny Tastes app and how it can help their patients!

While I was at Children's National, I saw something very amazing happening. It was their holiday celebration event, and our First Lady Michelle Obama was up on stage with the children at the hospital! It's wonderful that she could spend some time there to bring something special to these children & families who are spending the holiday in a hospital.

After each of the app demos in DC, I showed the medical providers a new product that we are working on called Tiny Tastes PRO! This is a companion product to the Tiny Tastes app, and we'll be sharing more details about it soon. But the brief summary of Tiny Tastes PRO is that it will function as an online web portal where parents and medical providers will be able to instantly see a visual history of everything a child has eaten along with Tiny in the app (or not) over time. This allows caregivers to easily track a child's progress with certain textures, colors, or types of food, as their dietary intake expands over the course of weeks or months. 

As a result, we already have a few feeding therapy clinics signed up to be Beta Testers for Tiny Tastes PRO. This means that in 2015 they will get a period of free access to the online product while they give us feedback in return. This will allow us to customize the web portal for their clinical needs, while it provides them with a free glimpse into their patients' home dietary intake patterns to optimize their patient care plans. Parents will also love Tiny Tastes PRO, since it will eliminate the need for hand-written detailed "diet records" which can be tedious to keep track of. Instead, simply use the Tiny Tastes app and let us do the rest!

If you think your clinic may be interested in participating in the free Beta Testing program with Tiny Tastes PRO, we are forming a waiting list now so please contact us for more information about this opportunity.



Yours, 
Tiny

Visit us at www.tinytastesworld.com

Holiday Contest Entries

Have you entered Tiny's Holiday Contest yet?  These kids have!  And they are sharing their love for Tiny through their beautiful artwork.

Visit TinyTastesWorld.com to find out how you can win a kid's tablet in time for Christmas. 

Once you enter online plug in to the extra chances to win using your child’s artwork onFacebook, Instagram and Twitter! Plus -- when you share Tiny's contest post from herFacebook page to your own, you will get 1 EXTRA contest entry!  

Please use our hashtags when entering the contest with your child's artwork: #tinytastesworld#tinytastesapp #healthykid

Contest runs through midnight on December 18, 2014.

Brought to you by www.tinytastesworld.com

Kids Love Tiny

 

Here are more of our contest photos... so adorable! Thank you to all the parents who are taking the time to download Tiny's app and participate with their children in our contest. It's exciting for us to receive such positive feedback and see how much fun kids are having with Tiny!

Visit us at www.tinytastesworld.com

Tiny & Emily Meet Rachael Ray!

It was so much fun to be part of the live studio audience for a taping of the Rachael Ray show in NYC!

We began the experience by waiting in a long line out on the sidewalk in the wintery cold weather here... waiting for security to check our bags and go through an airport-security-grade scanner before we could enter the building.

Then almost 100 of us were waiting in a small "holding room" where we were shown a video of the episode clips that were shot earlier in the day. Apparently they film her show in shifts & chunks. Today was a makeover episode, and unfortunately the audience who was part of the first taping of the day only got to see the "Before" version of the featured woman who was receiving a makeover. Luckily for us, our audience group was the last shift of the day so we got to watch the Before footage while we were in the holding room... and then also experience the full transformation of the After reveal while we were in the studio as the rest of the episode was filmed in real-time with us. I hadn't realized that there could be more than 1 studio audience involved in the taping of a single episode of a show. If look closely at the audience, you may notice it sometime! 

And of course there was the cooking segment - Rachael showed us how to make a warming vegetarian meal, as well as how to prepare those fabulous kale chips that we see in the markets a lot now. It is actually really easy to bake them up at home, for a delicious & nutritious alternative to other salty snacks!

Today they were also filming an episode for an early-January showing already now too. For that segment, they had a panel of 3 experts join Rachael in her kitchen, one of each sharing their medical, nutritional, and financial advice for 2015. The nutritionist that Rachael invited to speak in this episode was actually Keri Glassman, who is someone who has written about picky eating. We wish we could have spoken with her, since she was right across the room there talking with Rachael and she would probably be VERY interested to hear about Tiny Tastes! But due to filming we didn't get that moment to talk. Ah well, maybe she will read our blog someday  :)

Tiny's Holiday Contest Is Here!

We have 2 words for you: FREE TABLET! 

We're celebrating the Holidays with a contest!! 

Visit www.TinyTastesWorld.com to find out how you can win a kid's tablet in time for Christmas. 

Once you enter online plug in to the extra chances to win using your child’s artwork on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter! Plus -- when you share Tiny's contest post from her Facebook page to your own, you will get 1 EXTRA contest entry!  

Please use our hashtags when entering the contest with your child's artwork: #tinytastesworld #tinytastesapp #healthykids

Contest begins today --December 1, 2014-- and runs through midnight on December 18, 2014. Winner will be notified via email on December 20, 2014.

Good luck!!