Top Five Activities to Do Around the House with Children

It’s the middle of winter right now and we’ve not had the best of times with the weather so far with rain, snow and storms since the end of November. This can lead to frustrated children and frustrated children tends to lead to stressed parents, so we’re letting you know what works for us in preventing our children from turning into rampaging monsters during the wet weekends and school holidays at this time of year.

Wear Them Out With Games

While board games are, depending on the game, educational as well as fun for smaller children, yet I find that these types of games do not manage to resolve the frustration at being stuck inside at this time of year due to the weather. I’ve always found that playing hide-and-seek and running around the house like lunatics, although it’s sure to leave you with plenty more cleaning up than a board game, is the perfect way to spend a cold, wet afternoon in winter.

As well as this if you have a games console, such as an Xbox 360 with the Kinect sensor that tracks your movements, allows the same kind of running around madness without messing up your house as its large collection of games allows children, and adults too!, to play games in a unconventional way using their arms, legs and bodies as a controller.

The plus side of these physical games is that it can tire the youngsters out nice and early, giving you the chance to relax early in the evening! My favourite past-time when this happens is bingo online at Butlersbingo.com and it is one of my favourite places to play!

Baking

It does seem as if we’re getting into a pattern of making a mess of the house but, in my opinion, a messy house is a happy house! My children love creating things, whether it be colouring, drawing, Lego, but their favourite thing to create is food they can eat!

They love nothing more than to be sat in the kitchen creating cupcakes, cookies and brownies amongst a million other sweet treats and this can while away the wet and miserable hours!

Jumping in Muddy Puddles

If your children, like mine, are Peppa Pig fans then you’ll know exactly where I’m coming from with this one! Putting on a pair of wellington boots and a heavy jacket as well as gloves and a hat to keep the cold and wet out gives you plenty of hours of fun bouncing around in the garden, or even in the park, as the young ones replicate their favourite young pig from TV.

Just don’t tell my wife or I’ll be in trouble!

Movie Marathon

Sometimes when it’s horrible outside no-one is in the mood jumping around the house like lunatics or getting soaking wet in muddy puddles and a perfect remedy for boredom in these times is firing up the DVD player and watching some movies with big bowls of popcorn!

My house is split between watching older Disney Princess movies, like Cinderella, Snow White or Beauty and the Beast, or the newer animated movie series’ like Madagascar, Ice Age and Toy Story as well as many others from recent years. I have to admit that this is my favourite of all the things to do as I think I love the films (and the popcorn!) more than the children!

Cleaning

This may seem as a surprise addition to the list, but hear me out. Ok, children don’t tend to like cleaning the mess that they’ve made after them, but if you decide to have a big house wide and family cleaning event where everyone gets involved and is assigned specific duties, from my experience anyway, they love it. Alternatively just call a cleaning company like this one.

It gets the house nice and clean, takes their minds away from the pouring rain outside, and you can reward them for all their hard work giving them a sense that they themselves have achieved something, just like Mommy and Daddy do.