Fighting Off Cabin Fever: Snow Day Ideas

It has warmed up from -9 to -3 here this morning.  Brrrrrrrrrrrrr.

You'll forgive me if I don't start digging out the beach wear just yet.  It is so cold that even the pooch doesn't want to stay out and romp in the snow for long, and that never happens. 

Thought the picture above spoke of sunny days in faraway summers.  Don't know about everyone else, but I could use a warm, balmy breeze.

It is another day off school today, and that dull cabin fever feeling has begun to set in at our house.  It is time to break out the momma ammunition, and I thought others could use some inspiration as well:

-- The "I'm Bored" Jar
-- Craft Closet Basics
-- Strategies For Sick And Rainy Days (also good for snow days!)
-- Snow Day Ideas
-- The Craft Closet Concept

That's just a little to get things started.  At our house today, we are most likely to break out some puzzles, games or Legos, peppered with a little minecraft playing and reading.  Yesterday was filled with a lot of coloring, movies and snow watching, so we'll try to mix it up a bit.

Stay warm, everyone.

(Photo via Renato Targa.  Lovely!)

Planning For The Inevitable Fall

The day is gorgeous here, with the sun shining high in the sky and the temperatures soaring well into the 80s again today.  But the leaves have begun their inevitable fall, crisping slightly at the edges while they turn their glorious shades of flame, before letting go and diving toward the earth just in time for winter's chill.

If you listen carefully, you can hear their loss in the increasing rustle of the leaves, rattling their last songs against the coming howling winds of winter.

Bad weather is coming.  Let the planning begin.

This is the time of year where I begin to take stock of what we have in our craft closet and what I have put away in our "snow day" stash.  This is important stuff, if only to stave off the cries of "I'm booooooored" when the weather gets nasty.

I began our craft closet and bad weather craft and activity stash as an off-shoot of the "rainy day cupboard" that Sarah Ban Breathnach discusses in her Mrs. Sharp's Traditions book.  It is such a fantastic idea, and a lifesaver for momma's everywhere -- especially those with young children who get impatient about being stuck indoors for more than five minutes at a time.  As she says in the book:

...What can be of enormous benefit to both parents and children is a plan to help them realize it is never really the weather that is disagreeable, only our attitudes toward it.  Even the stormiest hours can be made bright if there are special activities that are enjoyed only on rainy days....

This is true not just for rainy days at our house but, especially, snow days that stretch beyond a single day away from school due to inclement conditions.

At our house, the craft closet is always open for perusing and using.  It includes a fairly constant assortment of colored cardstock, glue sticks, construction paper, scissors and other hole-punch goodies, drawing books, drawing paper, colored pencils and crayons and markers of all sorts, and a whole host of other goodies that my wee girlie (and me, too!) love to doodle and color and play with on bad weather days and for school projects alike.

The "Rainy Day Cupboard" portion, though, is kept separate and is only brought out on the worst weather days or when we are in the throes of an extended bout of sickness, when boredom is at its peak and cabin fever has begun to set in with a vengeance.

This I stock with:

-- Special coloring books -- like these from Ruth Heller, who has a wide variety of complex designs for coloring that are wonderfully intricate and absolutely beautiful.

-- DVDs of movies we've never seen before (harder and harder to find, thanks to Netflix, but still something I can occasionally scrounge out of the $5 sale bin -- The Last Starfighter was a big hit this past year).

Rainy Days And Mondays: Craft Closet Basics

Woke up to a dreary outside this morning.  It is the last week of school at our house, with summertime fast approaching and The Peanut is ready and waiting for a nice break in the action.

This morning's rain is a good reminder that I need to reassess the contents of our craft closet and our rainy day cupboard.  Keeping both well stocked with activity starters and crafting basics is a great way for all of us to maintain some level of sanity on the inevitable bad weather days of summer.

Because we didn't have a horrible winter this year, a lot of the project starters that I had gotten for snow day activities never got pulled out, so I have several "things to do" kits and starter bits and pieces already on hand.

But I am always on the lookout for something new to replenish my stash.  Ever since I read about the "rainy day cupboard" in Sarah Ban Breathnach's Mrs. Sharp's Traditions: Reviving Victorian Family Celebrations of Comfort & Joy, I have tried to keep things on hand to get any crafting day started. Who wants to have to run out in bad weather for glue sticks, right?

Here's what you can do to start your own:

The I'm Bored Jar: Revised

This is a re-post of this, with some updated ideas for the list of things to put in the jar.  The Peanut and I added some new sticks for this summer -- thought folks would like an updated listing for their jars as well.  Enjoy!

As of yesterday, we hit that point in summer break -- one week into it, mind you -- where the cries of "I am sooooooooo Bored!" had already begun.

Yesterday afternoon was a bit rainy and gloomy, making outside play a little dicey which was a big part of the problem.   Perfect for springing my master plan for summer amusement.

Luckily, this year I had a secret weapon:  I found the idea for an "I'm bored" jar on Pinterest -- from the blog Shaydes of Life -- before the end of school.  With a little searching, I found several more iterations of the same theme bouncing around Pinterest, and had pinned several more blog posts and similar ideas for just such a moment.

I had also picked up a couple of packages of jumbo craft sticks -- they come 75 to a pack for less than $3 at most WalMarts and craft stores.  We already had a large jar that was just gathering dust, having been recently emptied of its contents when I cleaned out a cabinet upstairs.  We also had some ultra fine tipped Sharpie markers, and various cardstock paper scraps that could be fashioned into a label.

It really isn't a lot to get this started:

A Summer Filled With Wonder?

As May whizzes by me, heading directly toward June and the end of the school year, I have begun to contemplate what our summer might look like this year.

That's a bit difficult to do, mind you, because I still haven't gotten my test results back from the additional oncotype testing on the tumor that was removed, and thus still have no idea whether I'll be facing chemo or radiation next...makes it incredibly difficult to plan a summer's worth of activities for my 10 year old when I can't even make treatment plans for myself.

But because I am a planner, I'm trying to at least come up with some back-up options nonetheless.  Just in case.  And mostly because I fear we'll be stuck inside a lot due to me being exhausted from whatever treatment is thrown my way, and I want to have some fun things on hand to mitigate the eternal boredom of my wee girlie should the issue arise.

Or, at the very least, figure out some outdoorsy things we can do that won't require an enormous expenditure of energy for me.  Picnics spring to mind or outdoor tea parties or something like that, perhaps.

On my Pinterest page, I've been collecting ideas on my "Fun With My Daughter" board, and also on my "Fun and Crafty" board.  I'll be collecting ideas in earnest this week and hope to have some great possibilities to share with everyone over the weekend.

One thing we will almost certainly do at some point, and something we have done before, is a little Alice in Wonderland themed tea party.  It's our own little "girls night" ritual on evenings when dad is out of town, and The Peanut still loves to just hang out with tea sandwiches and conversation when we get time (free time hasn't been frequent of late, let me tell you, which is a really good reason to try ad make this happen a little more regularly this summer).  Our oldest niece is coming out to stay with us for a few weeks this summer, so perhaps we'll wait until she gets here and have a "tea for three" party instead.

Motherhood Is Not For Sissies

What do you get when you cross a momma who is still recovering from surgery, a project due immediately that we completely forgot about and are putting together in a rush, and a hot glue gun?

A big OWWWWWWIEEEE, that's what.

But the project is finished, and I have an ice pack at the ready, so life is good.

I don't care what anyone says, motherhood is not for sissies.  Now pass me the ice pack...

The Disney Game

Our family has been playing a sort of variation on twenty questions for years to make waiting in lines or dealing with delays a much more amusing time for The Peanut.  It occurred to me the other day, as we were playing it yet again waiting for a table at a restaurant, that this might be a fun idea to pass along for other families, too.

Here is how we play it:

One person thinks of a character from a Disney movie.  It can be classic Disney, newer Disney, or Pixar, or even one of the Pixar short films.  But we do try to stick to cartoons or movies where there is some level of animation (say Mary Poppins, Pete's Dragon, or Enchanted, for example).

Once the character has been selected, everyone else gets to guess who it is.

We generally begin with a clue that goes something like "this character is ____________."  This can be hairy, stinky, green, crazy, evil, covered in spots, slightly coated in mucus, whatever...but the fill in the blank part needs to be something descriptive and just obscure enough that it doesn't give it away from the get go.

Reflections From A Recovering People Pleaser

The last few years have been filled with a lot of ups and downs, stresses and strains, and not so pleasant diagnoses requiring the devotion of time and energy to a lot of things outside of our control.  Life is driving me, events are pushing me around and the needs of others dictating what I do each day instead of me really consciously directing anything about how I am living my own life.

What has resulted is that I feel like I am living like a ping pong ball, constantly dodging and bouncing back and forth, up and down, but not really getting to any solid conclusion...just with another round of bouncing about looming in the distance as I get a chance to catch my breath from the last round.

Alas, just bobbing about like this isn't enough.

I need goals to work toward, mountains that I consciously choose to climb, something of my own amid the din of everything else that needs doing to sustain my own inner drive. 

But how to do that without sacrificing the well-being of my family, without taking away from them too much while giving myself some desperately needed space of my own?  It's a struggle for me.

Growing Up

As hard as it is to say, our little Peanut is growing up. 

We had such a great time on the beach together during our recent trip:  hunting for shells, laughing at the antics of the dogs chasing seagulls on the beach, giggling at the funny little sandpipers, and trying to spot dolphins as they appeared and disappeared in the waves closer to shore.  It was wonderful.

Reconnecting is always nice. 

Being able to do so away from the day-to-day rushing is so much better.  Not having a myriad of distractions and an endless "to do" list of things that need to be done right now lurking in the background makes having those longer conversations or quiet walks along the shore or in a nature preserve or any number of other wonderful things we were able to do while we were away so much more meaningful on so many levels.

It got me thinking about how we might better do that on a weekly basis at home as well.

And The Day After That...

You ever have one of those mornings where you wake up in a fairly good mood, only to have it go down hill faster than a snowman on an ice patch? 

That was me this morning, trying to scrounge together a lunch, the trash for pick-up, and the elements of a science experiment that had to go in with The Peanut to school this morning, along with a freshly washed angel costume (mercifully, now without its various and sundry stains and other assorted ick that had accumulated on it from last year's play after two washings in hot water yesterday), a signed assignment book and something else that was critical but that I don't even remember now because of the frenzy.  I hate it when mornings are like this, and even more so when the morning hits me full on in the face before I've been able to have more than a couple of sips of coffee.

I am afraid that I lost my temper.  I got a little yell-y at one point out of frustration and rushing and trying to simultaneously pull together twenty things at once and get The Peanut out the door on time, and now am sincerely regretting it. 

How could it have been prevented? 

By planning ahead or at least getting some of the things together the night before so that the full on crazed, sprinting lunacy that was my morning today would have been at least mitigated a little bit by things that could have been already done before the crack of dawn.  Alas, my morning today was a mess of ginormous proportions, and I've finally had enough.  I know I can't be the only one out there who feels like this.

A Less Hectic Christmas? That's My Wish.

What about a quiet, peaceful Christmas, filled with joy and time together, with lots of laughter and hugs, with contentment and warm cocoa and as much love as you could possibly give to each other, each and every day? 

Wouldn't that be the very best present you could ever hope for this year?

It certainly would for me.  A less hectic, more family-centered Christmas sounds like just the thing I want in my stocking this year.

Here are a few things I'm hoping to do to make that happen for us:

It's A Miracle...

(Salt stalactite and stalagmite formations as they were growing, photo by Christy Hardin Smith.)

It is definitely that science fair time of year.  We have been growing stalactites and stalagmites in our sun room for a month. 

Mason jars, filled with three separate solutions, some string and a whole lot of drippage into those aluminum foil roaster pans you use for turkeys at Thanksgiving, just growing away, day in and day out.  All weekend long, The Peanut and her project partner worked on their poster display and their project abstract, with momma helping out with printing and glue dots here and there.  (It turns out that 9 year old girls are no better at keeping their fingers from getting stuck together than the 8 year old variety were.  Go figure.)

Thank goodness it is completed -- on time, no less! -- and we managed to get everything to school this morning without spilling or breaking it. 

It really is a miracle.

There I was, only a half a cup of coffee in my system, riding in the back of Mr. ReddHedd's SUV, holding onto these experiment trays for dear life, wincing at every bump and turn because they were  filled with jars with liquid and fragile stalactite and stalagmite formations suspended between them.

Yikes.

She Blinded Me With Science

The school science fair is on Monday.

We'll be spending the weekend knee deep in pictures and posters, no doubt.  The Peanut has spent the last day or so trying to come up with a color scheme that says "caves are awesome." 

We'll also be trying to figure out how to transport jars with string, liquid and nascent stalactites hanging down from the house to school without harming the whole thing entirely.  Prayers and safe thoughts are much appreciated.  They will definitely be needed.

Parenting.  It is NOT for sissies.

(YouTube -- Thomas Dolby, She Blinded Me With Science.)

Walking The Walk

After spending the weekend running around from this to that and back again, I've realized a couple of things:

1.  I am horribly out of shape and I have no energy.

2.  We need to eat more fruits and veggies, because I feel so much better when my diet is more plant-centric.  So more of that, please.

We've been trying to emphasize a healthier diet for The Peanut, who is a little fruit and veggie adverse, quite frankly, due to some food texture issues.  Things like seeds (pretty much any berries, hello!) or bumpy bits (say hello to broccoli and cauliflower) completely squick her out -- we keep trying, but let's just say the food processor and the VitaMix are my friends here.

But it occurs to me that we haven't been setting the best parental example of late, either. 

Things have been so busy at our house that we have been failing to plan and just scrambling to get any food on the table at all.  That's no good.  For any of us.

So today will be all about assessing what we have in the pantry, fridge and freezer, and then trying to plan healthier menus around that with, perhaps, a trip to the store for fresh produce. 

Better Planning For Our Pauses

Fall is my favorite season.  Waking up to crisp mornings that mellow into warmed sunshine afternoons, the golden light that illuminates the world in a sort of hazy glow as it eases toward sunset.

My inclination this time of year is to prepare the house for nesting over the winter.

It is a bit like a squirrel lining its den, I suppose, but I have this urge to straighten and tidy and fortify the pantry with delicious snacking and baking staples in case of a snow day somewhere in the distant future.

Do we have puzzles and games aplenty, all currently stored at the ready?  Including a vast supply of legos just waiting to be built into something awesome?  Check.  And check.

Is there plenty of popcorn and assorted tidbits that The Peanut finds deliciously munchable?  Check.

Can we make some snickerdoodles at the drop of a hat?  Yeppers!

One of the things I do is to make sure I've stashed away some activities -- new coloring books, a craft project or two, something to paint or assemble, a fresh drawing pad, a new-ish movie or two picked up from the $5 or less bin, you name it -- so that when the inevitable snow day strikes, we have a new and exciting something-or-other to do.

I have done this since The Peanut was small.

Building An Enthusiastic Reader

This morning, The Peanut woke up for school when her alarm went off, brushed her teeth, got dressed, fussed with her hair a little bit...and then crawled right back into bed to read for another half an hour.

Her father, thinking she hadn't gotten up at all, rushed upstairs to get her moving only to find her nose completely buried in the Percy Jackson series.  Which is how she was last night, too, when we had to make her turn her lights out and go to sleep.

It really is every parent's dream to build an enthusiastic reader, isn't it?  But how do you do it?

I don't have the answer for every child, but in terms of my own child I do think this was key:  we have been reading to her and with her since she was tiny.  We never went anywhere without a book -- in the diaper bag, in the back seat of the car within reach of her car seat when she was younger, all over our house in every room, fairy tales on my kindle, good stories crammed on her bookshelves in her own room...first in board books and later in regular books and then on her own kindle.

We wanted her to know that reading is important to us, so that it will also be important to her...and from the earliest age. 

Both of us are big readers -- we read every night before bedtime, and have made it a point to let The Peanut crawl in bed and read with us fairly often.  Also, during the summer on hot and humid afternoons when being outside in the sweltering haze is miserable, she and I will crawl onto the king-sized master bed and enjoy some reading time in the air conditioned splendor together.

Also, each summer, The Peanut and I pick out a book to read together -- something that might have been a big reach for her when she was smaller, but that was a wonderful story.  One summer it was The Cricket in Times Square -- we happened to be taking a trip to New York City that summer, to tag along with daddy to a conference, and I wanted to introduce her to the hum and rattle of the city and the subways before we got there. She loved it, and we spent the time in New York periodically looking for lost crickets, which was very fun indeed for wee girlies.

Another year, it was The Borrowers, a story that I highly recommend reading aloud together. At the time we read it, the vocabulary would have been well past where The Peanut was, but by reading it together she got a wonderful story and a built-in personal dictionary and context explainer right there in the chair next to her, and that was both handy and cozy.

The "Perfect" Storm

Lately, my perfectionist tendencies have been going gangbusters, which is making the lives of my family absolutely miserable.

Maybe it's a result of the insanely busy schedule we have all been keeping.  As if the start of school and all of its meetings and catch up work on room and curriculum and about 80 bazillion other things aren't enough to try to manage, this year is stacked.  The first couple of weeks of school have coincided with a lot of business trips for Mr. ReddHedd.  When you add that to some extracurricular activities for The Peanut having hyped themselves on steroids just prior to the local Italian Heritage Festival in which she'll be participating this year? 

You end up with one frazzled momma.

Today I'm juggling laundry, class preparations, trying to re-organize my closet area to get better access to my clothes and attempting to somehow come up with a healthy menu plan that isn't too difficult to prepare and that everyone in the family can eat.  Easier said than done if my initial stab is indicative this morning.

Worse, while making breakfast, I kept getting interrupted by The Peanut who was bored and demanding immediate attention and I snapped at her, causing a whole cascade of pouting and discussion about tone and...well, you know how that goes, you feel guilty for losing your temper and that just makes everything worse, doesn't it?

The Peanut's New Desk Organizer

As I mentioned the other day, The Peanut and I put together a new desk organizer.   We wanted to make sure her desk was clear and able to be used whenever she wanted for craft projects and fun for the rest of the summer.

Plus, I wanted to clear it off and have it ready before school began again -- it is, after all, intended to be her homework space, too.

Frankly, we've let far too much clutter pile up this summer on all of our flat surfaces, and I've kind of hit a wall with clutter this week and gone on a trash bag frenzy ridding us a bit of excess crap and piling things into donate boxes that could be of better use to someone who needs things we aren't, honestly, ever going to really enjoy.  (You know, all those presents that aren't really you and silly impulse purchases you later regret?  I can't be the only one with a house full of this stuff, can I?) 

I got the original idea for this type of organizer from the Create*Teach*Share blog -- still loving it!   We had a lot of fun making an organizer for my school library desk area, and The Peanut has been wanting to make one of her own ever since.

I wanted to share some pictures of how The Peanut's turned out -- it is really colorful and, best of all, incredibly useful with a small footprint on the top of her desk.

Microscope Morning

We spent a big chunk of yesterday cleaning off The Peanut's desk.

It had become piled with a variety of things -- American Girl doll items, detritus from the last school year, random magazines, craft supplies and el cheapo plastic toy bits from who knows where -- and was really unusable as a desk since there was no real space to put anything.

Earlier in the week, we had purchased another plastic organizer with drawers from Lowes.  This one had all large drawers, instead of a mix of small and large like the one I used for my school library organizer.

And it fits perfectly on the back of her desk.

I let her pick out the patterned paper she wanted to use for drawer colors and we put together a desk supplies organizer for her.  Once it was done, we started clearing off her desk and putting away various and sundry bits and pieces into the drawers which we then labeled with the label maker (her new favorite toy).

Turtle Time At The South Carolina Aquarium

While we were in Charleston, SC, we spent two days exploring their aquarium.  One of The Peanut's favorite things was getting to spend some time up close with the sea turtle in their big aquarium.

She absolutely loves sea turtles, and was thrilled that we could make a donation to the South Carolina Aquarium's sea turtle rescue program.

The above shot was taken on our first visit, while The Peanut and I were standing next to their big tank window gazing at all the fish and sharks.  The sea turtle decided to come down and swim around right in front of us -- serious fun! -- while The Peanut just stood there staring at her completely mesmerized.

Here's a closer view of the sea turtle -- she cooperated and came in even closer while I was snapping a few pictures: