Where to Wednesday: 10 Things To Do When It’s Too Cold To Go Anywhere!

1.  Turn The Bathroom Into A Hair & Nail Salon

I’ve been trying to get Maggie to practice her letters. I thought of 3 words she would be interested in & put them on the bathroom door. Once we went over all the letters/ words we could open the door for a surprise in the bathroom: it was a salon for the day! I put curlers, bows, makeup, nail polish etc around the bathroom. Then we spent some time getting “all dolled up”. The girls loved it. We only have 1 bathroom, so when my husband got home from work, he was quickly reminded he lives in a house of girls, when he saw the sign on the door!

2.  Host A Dance Class

Maggie loves her ballet class & Alex can’t wait to start. If it were up to Maggie, she would go everyday, but that’s not possible. So, sometimes we bring ballet class to our house! The girls get dressed up & I bring the music. We start with a warm up, practice our ballet steps & then do fun dances like the Chicken Dance. This ends up being exercise for mom too!

3. Go Fishing In The Living Room

This girls got this cute fishing set for Christmas. It’s great set to practice colors & numbers. We use pillows to build a pond. Once they are done fishing, they like to jump into the “pond” & pretend to swim. 

4. Have A Concert

Set up a stage, break out the instruments & find fun costumes!

5. Cook

Cooking is a great indoor activity. I like to break all the ingredients in half, so each of the girls has plenty of ingredients to add. This also helps the process entertain a little longer. The crockpot is a great tool for cooking with kids, because you can let them add all the ingredients themselves & then turn it on after they are done. Thanks to the crockpot, my girls think that they cook dinner all the time. Today we came up with a delicious way to make brownies in the crockpot & I’ll be sharing the recipe soon!

6.  Turn Your House Into an Obstacle Course:  Our house has a nice little “route” where the kids can run in circles from room to room.  So to burn off some energy, we made a little homemade obstacle course complete with climbing under chairs, doing jumps and rolls, climbing over couches, jumping from pillow to pillow, walking on a “beam”, and more.  You can get creative with whatever you have lying around the house and mix it up when they need a little twist!

7.  “Jazz Up” Snack Time:  For our “snow day” afternoon snack time, we jazzed it up.  First of all, we made “Cabin Fever” trail mix (aka Clean out your Cupboard Trail Mix):  Find anything that is open in your cupboards and mix it together for a fun snack (especially if you mix marshmallows and chocolate chips to the mix!).  We also did a little fun craft, Pudding Paint.  I always keep those individual vanilla puddings on hand in the pantry.  Add a little food coloring to the pudding and you can paint away!

8.  Color Scavenger Hunt:  Put different color pieces of construction paper on the floor and have a fun little color scavenger hunt in your house.  A perfect way to entertain the kids and teach them colors!

9.  Hot Wheel Bath:  Make bath time a little more exciting when you add some Hot Wheels and bubbles to the mix.  

10.  Backwards Night:  This is one of our favorite things that we do in our house and do it at least once a week!  My husband works long days which means he often misses dinner and bath time during the week.  To make those long evenings pass by, some days we get dessert (often a popsicle that they can eat in the bath), hop in the bath, put our pajamas on, and then eat dinner.  The kids love the change in routine and so does the mommy!