ifamily | Bringing Winter Indoors

I’m sitting here right now early in the morning looking out the window to my back yard. I am dreaming of the screen door slamming shut as my little man runs outside to dig in the sandbox while I finish his making his breakfast. He found one of his sand shovels the other day and looked at me so pleadingly when he said “I just want to dig!” Oh how I want him to be able to dig in the sand too! But, there is a good three feet or more of snow covering that sandbox and it’s supposedly forty below with the wind chill factor so digging in the snow outside isn’t going to happen either!

My son’s digging query reminded me of a blog post I read at “Under The Sycamore” a while back where she hauled bucket loads of snow into her bathtub and let her kids go wild. I have decided that this is what we are doing today!

I think initially it would be a good idea to prep the bathroom by laying towels on the floor and rolling a few up for knee padding. You will also need to locate and gather all of the toys that your kids will be using to play with the snow. My sand toys are also all buried under three feet of snow so I’ll be pulling out kitchen staples like large serving spoons and plastic containers. One thing that the above blogger did that I likely won’t be doing is mixing food colouring and water and filling water guns with it so her boys could shoot and paint the snow. I’m terribly afraid it would stain my tub but I’ll be researching other ways I could get the same effect.

Once you have everything gathered it’s time to haul in the snow and start playing before it all melts! Initially I think I would just let him play from outside the tub but if he really wants to I’ll probably let him put on some boots and get right in there. Either way, I love the idea of playing in the snow without having to bundle him up!

Update: Here's a pic of the snow/tub fun. I used 14 mop pail buckets to "fill" the tub. Being that my tub on the second floor I was one sweaty momma after carrying them all upstairs! I almost wanted to lay in that snow myself! On a side note, even 6 hours later there was still a lot of snow left in the tub so it's fun for the kids to come back to lots!