Things to Do with Your Kids During a Snowstorm

We're expecting our first doozy of a snowstorm this year starting in the middle of the night tonight. My kids are in hybrid school and were scheduled for asynchronous online learning tomorrow, which means that their schedule is unaffected by the storm. Fortunately, other than a 30-minute check-in with their assistant teacher at a specific time, they can get their work done on their own time. Which means we can go outside and play in the snow almost whenever we want. Given the pandemic, I feel like this may even be an opportunity to get together with friends for a sledding date. Masks will be appreciated in the snow and cold, and single-person sleds are perfect for social distancing. Since we live directly across the street from a park with a fabulous sledding hill, I can even sponsor a hot cocoa party in the parking lot afterwards. 

If you are in a similar situation and may be looking to take a work break and hang with your kids tomorrow (inside or out), here is a list of great things to do with your kids on a snowy day.

• Go sledding. (Duh.)
• Make snow angels. (Double duh.)
• Blow bubbles and watch them freeze.
• Collect fresh snow and make sno-cones.
• Have a snowball fight.
• Fill small balloons with water and a few drops of food coloring and leave them outside to freeze, then peel off the balloons and line your walkway with multicolored "crystal" balls.
• Have a hot cocoa tasting. Experiment with using water, milk, and half and half; whipped cream vs. marshmallows; dip the rim with a little hot cocoa and roll it in colored sugar; try adding a squirt of caramel or coffee syrup.
• Bake cookies.
• Bake bread.
• Make soup.
• Go ice skating.
• Have a board game marathon.
• Make s'mores over the fireplace. Or over the stove top if you don't have a fireplace.
• Pull out the toasting forks and toast bread or cook hotdogs over the fire.
• Read one of your favorite childhood books out loud. 
• Go shovel a neighbor's driveway together.
• Shovel out all the fire hydrants on your street together.
• Pop a bunch of popcorn and make a garland to add to your Christmas tree.
• Go through some old family albums and tell them stories about when you were their age.
• Watch a holiday movie together.
• Teach your kids a new skill: how to sew on a button, how to change a tire (best if you have a garage), how to do laundry, how to fry an egg, how to change a lightbulb.
• Do a home improvement project together: hang a picture, level a table, repaint a wall, caulk a window.
• Plan a vacation. Either a real one that could actually happen after the pandemic, or a dream one. Show them how to research online. Set a budget. Make choices based on that budget. 
• If you have a bird feeder, teach them to identify some of the common birds. If you don't, sprinkle some birdseed on top of the snow and see how long it takes the birds to find it. Spread a pine cone with peanut butter and roll it in birdseed, then hang it from a tree for the birds. 
• Make a snowman. Don't forget to give it a hat, a scarf, and a carrot nose.
• Go for a walk in the snow. 
• Catch snowflakes on your tongue. 
• Do karaoke. Let the kids teach you one of their favorite songs. Teach them one of yours.
• Have a dance party in the living room. 
• Try on all the clothes in each of your wardrobes. Put everything that doesn't fit in a bag and donate it. 
• Have the kids go through all their old toys and donate ones they've outgrown. Throw away anything that's broken or has missing pieces. 
• Collect all your loose change and put them into coin rolls. 
• Teach them how to polish silver and have a tea party with your fancy silver and china.
• Have breakfast for dinner.
• Eat dinner in reverse, starting with dessert. 
• Wear your pajamas all day. Stuffed animals optional.
• Bring your sleeping bags into the living room and watch a movie that ends past their bedtimes.

Whatever you love to do with your family, do that. Whatever your kids love to do, do it with them. Let them spirit move. Don't be afraid to be silly. Don't feel you need to follow any kind of rules. Let yourself have fun. 

Happy snow day!

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. 

Snow Day!

The words “Snow Day” mean different things to different people. To school children, they mean a day of sleeping in and (depending on your age) either texting your friends or playing in the snow all day instead of going to school. To working folks, they mean blowing off shoveling until the temperature hits a positive number, working at home in your PJs all day, and as many extended coffee breaks as you want. To teacher-type working folks, they mean a day to catch up on housework and lesson plans but also a dreadful anticipation of sitting in a classroom in 120-degree weather in late June. To a stay-at-home-mom, they mean an opportunity to have wonderful seasonal fun with your children instead of the usual routine of dragging them, kicking and screaming, to the grocery store (because you did that yesterday, along with the rest of the known universe, once the meteorologists started going mental about the incipient snowpocalypse).

To a stay-at-home mom – at least, to this stay-at-home mom - a snow day will theoretically involve bundling up and making snow angels, having snowball fights, sledding on a local hill, maybe even ice-skating, all followed by mugs of hot cocoa with melty marshmallows. A mom of pre-schoolers and toddlers will envision making sno-cones out of clean, fresh snow and fruit juice, and creating beautiful snow- and ice-based crafts like paper snowflakes and glitter-covered polar bears and penguins and, if she surfs Pinterest at all, painting with snow and food coloring.

In her mind, her day will be spent thusly:

In reality, however, her day will look more like this:

Fortunately, no matter how her snow day actually goes, she can always end it like this: