When you are done splashing in all the muddy puddles, and the video games, and movies have bored to death what do you do??? Rainy days can be a challenge for us all. The kids don’t like being cooped up and I can’t handle them all over me all day. I don’t necessarily always feel like being a fun mom on a dreary rainy day, but it’s better than hearing all the fighting because they are bored. Here is how we survive the rainy season.
We cook together. I really do enjoy cooking for my family. I even like having help, most days, getting meals together. Rainy days are fun days to try out new things. We love dessert, so we tend to try out new sweet treats, but new dinner recipes can be fun as well. I usually try out recipes that are more complex, because I tend to skip those recipes for most dinners.
We can find lots of fun things to do with boxes. I’m the Amazon Prime kind of mom, so we tend to have an abundance of boxes. These are a couple of our favorites.
- We’ve made marble mazes with straws. This was easier with a shoe box lid so the box was flat. This took a while. They drew out the maze they wanted to make first. Then we cut the straws to fit and used a glue gun to glue the straws to the box. I only had two box lids so they had to pair up and make the maze. It probably worked better that way rather than me having to help out so much with my 5 and 7 year old.
- They have also drawn a city inside of the box for their cars to drive around in. Even my older boys had fun with this. They even cut holes in the boxes to connect them to another box. My 5 year old had the most fun playing with the cities that were made, but my older 3 had fun making the cities. They giggled together for a while so I think it was a win.
- Pinterest also has an unending list of things to do with boxes.
Card and domino games. It’s been difficult to find games that keep everybody happy, but were finally getting our youngest old enough to be able to enjoy playing all together. My oldest 2 boys like to play hearts and spades. My youngest 2 kids team up with my husband and I to keep everybody involved, and learning how the game works. My 5 year old loves to play chicken foot and spoons. We can all enjoy playing Phase 10, Uno and BS as well.
Try not to laugh challenges are fun. They are these YouTube videos the kids told me about. Think America’s Funnies Video type of videos,. We watch them and try not to laugh. The one who laughs first loses. My kids are giggly for the most part, so it’s funny watching them trying not to laugh. I end up losing simply watching them. Be sure and view these first, not all are appropriate. Yes this is more video watching, but it’s almost game like.
My daughter loves to get crafty. This makes for a good moment to dig out random items in the crayon bucket and make random stuff. If your crayon bucket is like mine, it’s full of all kinds of who knows what. This is the perfect time to clean it all out and tell them to make something silly. You could also find a roll of tape and sheets of paper and tell the kids to see how tall a tower they can make. We haven’t done this at home, but I’ve done it at school with my class. You don’t have to be too crafty, but it’s fun and makes your brain think differently.
