I am getting this a lot at my house. “Mom, when is winter going to be over?” Well frankly, I’m sort of wondering this myself. This past holiday weekend left our house and family feeling a little shell shocked. My tiny bundles of joy turned into house-trashing-lunatics who mostly screamed at everything and begged for junk food. I silently wondered what had happened to my amazing children and my “oh, so perfect” parenting skills. Then I did what I often do, I went online for find help for our winter duldrums and my crazed, cabin fevered, children and found these cool things…
TOP FIVE THINGS TO DO TO AVOID GETTING BORED ON A SNOW DAY
http://www.listmyfive.com/bab03079/The-Top-Five-Kids-Can-Avoid-Getting-Bored-on-a-Snow-Day
I found this website that listed five fun things to do when your kids are bored on a snow day and that peeked my creative juices a bit.
1. Build a snow fort and color it with food coloring.
This sounded fun. If you are in a place with a lot of snow and are tired of sledding and snow ball fighting, building a fort may be something fun for you and the kids. This will inevitably an all day adventure and you can make your snow fort as big and crazy as you want it to be.
2. Clean your room
This didn’t sound fun at all, but I remember as a kid I liked rearranging the furniture and creating a new look for our room. Tell the kids that they can clean their room, rearrange it and make decorations for it. I would suggest to them to create a reading spot, a computer/game spot and a fun sleeping spot. Also encourage them to create “art” for the walls.
There are other things listed in the article, but these struck me as the most fun.
FIND MOM SUPPORT
I realized that some of the best advice on the web came from mommy blogs and mom-pros who had been there and done that.
http://www.herchannel.com/finslippy
Finslippy has this great link to her Youtube channel, Momversation which are as series of videos of herself and other mom’s answering questions and giving great mom advice on various subjects. This site is such a great resource as parents are always trying to find new and better ways to teach our kids.
MOMPETITION.COM
http://www.themompetition.com/search/label/Video%20Short
These are such funny web shorts that have been created by an automated animator called Xtanormal.com. The animating software is fun to use, but it does take a minute to get used the robotic sounding voices and inflections. These little videos are so great because they make fun of our everyday mom conversations that play on our insecurities, our parenting and our out look on life. I love them.
Mommy on the Spot blog
Mommyonthespot has a really poignant post about The Delicate Line Between Surfing and Drowing, which really speaks to a mom’s need to do it all in a very little amount of time. Sometimes just hearing that other mothers are in the same boat as you can be very validating and in its own way also motivating as well.
OTHER NON BORING IDEAS
DANCE!!!!
Nothing beats the living room dance party. Torque up the tunes and dance, dance, dance. Add to your dance party by serving special juice smoothies and appetizers for dinner. Turn out the lights and grab flash lights, glow sticks and any other odd lighting to set the mood!!! Do your dance party after dinner and enjoy dancing together. Try playing Pandora.com or ilike.com I promise will get tired and it will be fun.
LIVING ROOM CAMP OUT
Grab all the camping gear, or make a fort if you don’t have any and create the world’s greatest living room camp out. Eat in the living room on paper plates in lawn chairs. Clear as much as the furniture as you can. Tell ghost stories and play board games in your tent as a family. The kids will love the sense of living room adventure.
FAMILY FILM FESTIVAL
All you need for your Family Film Festival are some old photos, film fotage and an imagination. Most of us own a video camera of some kind to capture all those precious childhood memories. Well, what better way to share those memories than with your kids. You can show old films and talk about when they were younger. A fun family activity is to put together a family film collage and then have a screening later that night. Also encourage the kids to make films by filming their toys and making up little stories. You can use a free editing program like Jcut to make your family films.
Try something like this fun little short. 🙂
With a little imagination, some resources and a good sense of humor, you can beat the winter blues. I know I will be trying some of these suggestions tonight 🙂
