During the summer I always wonder how we manage to make it through the winter when we spend 4+ hours a day outside in the summer. What do we do with those extra 4 hours of inside time in the cold winter months? Well, somewhere we manage and it really isn't too bad. We get outside if its over 20, although it hasn't gotten that warm too often lately. All the kids love to go outside and although our yard is flat, we have quite large piles of snow on the sides of the driveway these days, so the kids sled down those. One day last week, Sam ventured out further into the yard and got quite scared when he sunk into the snow up to his thigh. The boys do a pretty good job of holding the sled on top of the snow pile, so Abby can climb on and go for a ride with them.
On days when we don't go outside, the kids manage to find all sorts of other diversions for themselves. There's lots of fort building and jumping on cushions, blankets and pillows in the basement. There is also a lot of running around in circles through the kitchen, around the dining room table, around the couches and around and around again. The purpose of the running is varied, sometimes they're pretending they are planes racing, other times they are cars and other times they are cheetahs or monsters. All of the kids like to join in the racing fun and it is pretty much a daily ritual that the circle-running occurs after dinner for about 10 minutes or so, but it also occurs randomly during the daytime.
They also find lots of fun things to do with the stairs such as riding Matthew's mattress down the stairs, lining up 3 couch cushions end to end from the top of the stairs to the bottom and using them as a slide, and making a blanket into a cocoon around them and sliding bumpity-bump that way. I remember bumpity-bumping down the stairs in blankets as kids and wow, I have no desire to try that anymore, although the mattress and cushion sliding is a lot of fun.
We also do a fair number of art projects, puzzles, coloring, science experiments, reading and playing on the computer and playing other games (Sam is into Chutes and Ladders, Yahtzee, and Chess these days). We've played Yahtzee four times over the last week and in every game Sam has gotten a Yahtzee. How does that happen? Really? Four Yahtzees? He has beat me mightily in every game and now thinks he's a Yahtzee master. Well anyway, somehow we make it to the end of each day and we haven't gone crazy (at least not on most days), no one has gotten too hurt and we are fine. And the days are getting longer and soon the snow will be gone and we'll be outside for hours once again. But for now, we resume our winter activities.
