Here's That Rainy Day

(Dov Severinsen and Tommy Newsome performing "Here's That Rainy Day")

Boy, is it ever a rainy day today. It started raining last night, so when I woke up this morning my allergies were kicking up so my eyes are sore and swollen and itchy, and my joints are achy. Rainy days are not my friend, health-wise. And since I am a stay-at-home mom of two small (and extremely energetic) children, rainy days are not my kids' friend, either. So what to do on a yucky, rainy day? Here's a list of things that kids and moms can do or enjoy to throw off those rainy day blues.

• Bake something. A chilly, rainy day is the perfect time to let the oven heat up the kitchen and drive away the damp, replacing it with wonderful, homey smells. Let the kids help - it'll keep them busy, and they're more likely to eat something they helped make. (Especially if it's dessert.)
• Have a dance party. This may sound like it's just for kids, but it works just as well for adults. Crank up your favorite tunes and get moving. Do it while you fold the laundry or sweep the kitchen or scrub the bathtub, do it as a break between calling clients, do it just by itself for a few minutes. Or for more than a few minutes.
• Get creative. Color, paint, draw, glue something to something else. Dig out some feathers and glitter and construction paper and balloons and whatever else is languishing at the back of the kitchen junk drawer and create something. 
• Re-read a favorite book. Reading for pleasure tends to get shoved aside in our busy society. We barely have time to read a book from cover to cover, never mind reading it twice. So dust off something from your bookshelf that you loved years ago and love it all over again. Find one of your kids' favorite books that you haven't read in a while and read it out loud together.
• Play pretend. Create a blanket fort under the dining room table. Make the couch into a pirate ship. Find an old box and pretend it's a rocket ship to the moon. Make puppets out of old socks or clothespins or paper bags and put on a puppet show. Imagine you're the characters in your kids' favorite TV show or book and re-enact one of their favorite episodes, or make up a new one. 
• Put comfort food on the menu. Serve chicken pot pie, or lasagna, or stew, or pretty much anything made in a crock pot. They call it comfort food for a reason. 
• Jump in puddles. Embrace the wet, put on your raincoat, rain hat, and rain boots, find the biggest, deepest puddle you can, and get splashing. One of my favorite memories from my college years was during finals week when there was a horrible rainstorm, and my roommate and I took a study break and puddle-jumped on the quad for an hour, they came home and made hot cocoa. There's something incredibly emotionally renewing about jumping in puddles.

Here's that rainy day! Make the most of it.

The Best of Intentions

When it comes to doing cool projects with my kids, I always have the best of intentions but it doesn’t always work out the way I’ve hoped. Sometimes I come up with great ideas but when we do them, they either fizzle or the kids aren’t interested even if they seem cool to me. Sometimes I come up with great ideas but don’t ever get around to actually doing them, whether it’s because I don’t have the supplies on hand, or because I can’t catch the kids in the right mood, or because I can’t catch myself in the right mood. And sometimes, I just draw a blank.

Great ideas that kind of fizzled have included my infamous crayon-melting experiment (progress was too slow for short attention spans, not to mention that the final result was not nearly as spectacular as it was promised to be), making homemade Play-Doh (they didn’t want to help mix in the color because the dough was too hot), and snow painting with food coloring (the snow kept sticking to the paint brush).

Great ideas that I never quite got around to executing include freezing colored water in water balloons to decorate the front walk (the water balloons I got were too small and I haven’t gotten to the store to get better ones), making sugar-on-snow with real maple syrup (I keep forgetting to look for directions on line), and making glowing glitter jars from glow sticks (I have some glow sticks and glitter but believe it or not I don’t have a single clear jar with a tight-fitting lid anywhere in the house).

And as for drawing a blank, today I’m snowed inside the house with two small children (and a husband working from home who’d prefer I keep the children reasonably quiet and, if possible, in the kitchen and out of the playroom adjacent to the office) and essentially zero ideas. I’ve been scrolling through Pinterest, checking out projects in back issues of High Five magazine (remember those Highlights you used to read at the dentist’s office? This is the preschool version), and just generally staring out the window hoping for inspiration to strike. So far, inspiration consists of decorating sugar cookies (I have some premade dough in the fridge), making English muffin pizzas, and…well, that’s it, actually.

Fortunately, my kids are self-sufficient enough that they’ll come up with some ideas of their own. My best of intentions are likely to be trumped by my son’s suggestions of playing “Battle” or “Sword Explosion Robot War” or “Monster Truck Wrestling Ball” (rules of these games are created spontaneously and subject to change without notice), and by my daughter’s suggestions of…well, come to think of it, running in circles shrieking at the top of our lungs is pretty much her only suggestion.

Wait! I think I’ve just been struck with inspiration!!! I’ll just let my kids play whatever they want while I sit back with a cup of coffee and enjoy letting them just be kids. Yeah, that’s a pretty good intention. And I bet I’ll have no problems following through on that one.