If any of you are ready for some great activities to mix up your day to day winter routine, I have come up with a top list of our winter boredom busters.
1. Obstacle Course: This is a never-fail winter favorite. Pull off your couch cushions, bring in your chairs, and challenge your kids. Even Amelia crawled through the chair tunnel and over the cushion mountain.
2. Pull out those Family Videos. My kids can't get enough of watching themselves when they were just learning to walk or saying their first words.
3. Shaving Cream Creations. Thomas brought this idea home from kindergarten, just spray some shaving cream on the table and let your kids go wild. Clean up is not as bad as it may seem, just scrape the cream off then wipe the rest up with a rag.
4. Build a fort with your blankets, chairs, tables, and beds. My kids love it just as much as I did when I was a kid.
5. Dance Party. This one is a family favorite. The video below is from October.
7. We made a Cardboard Castle out of some boxes and wrapping paper rolls. The kids made a few decorations and some royalty was drawn on some toilet paper rolls. Kids had fun and even their friends thought the castle was pretty cool. Ours wasn't as cool as this one but it gives you an idea of what to do.
8. We love bringing outdoor games in like hide-and-seek, soccer, or fox and the chicken.
9. We also play a lot of regular games like hot potato, charades, and various board games.
10. Find Linny. Jared started little tradition of hiding a toy hamster ("Linny" from the Wonderpets) somewhere in the house. Linny stays hidden until the kids find it (sometimes it takes weeks) and then when he is found Jared hides him somewhere else. The kids get so excited when they are the one who finds Linny.
11. Playdough. I know moms who refuse to have playdough because of the mess, but it is a lot of fun. For a twist try making Kool-Aid playdough. I had to add quite a bit extra flour and salt to this recipe to stiffen it up (maybe I did something wrong because it got good reviews-maybe I should have slowly added the water) but once I did it had a great texture and smells great! The red kool-aid worked the best, and yellow and green flavors needed some food coloring added to be bright (yellow might not have had much color because Abigail dropped her bowl on the floor as she was stirring spilling everything--I just swept it up and gave it back to her but may have lost the kool-aid).
12. Lastly, we like to get artistic, and like to paint, draw, and color.
