Snowy Days

It's cold and icy here in Texas, and the above diagram just about sums up the way the majority of us Southerners feel about these conditions.  School has been out since Monday and, aside from a quick trip to the ER for an icy head bonk, we've been trapped in the house.

I know I stay home and the boys aren't in school yet, so I should be used to the stuff, right?  Wrong!  On a typical day, we're out of the house a lot.  In fact, we've already blown through this weeks Tot School list and I had to go on a mission to find some more activities for us.  Here's a look at some of the things we've been up to:

We raided our broken crayon jar and decided to make some new ones.  I had to help the kids peel the crayons...

But they had the breaking part down pat!

We put everything in a 300 degree oven until it got all warm, melted and bubbly.  I thought I'd ruined them because they appeared to all be brown, but they popped out looking amazing!

The bonus to this activity is that you're oven is on so the house heats up some more.  Of course, this isn't the case if you do it on a day with random rolling black outs...

The boys built a train out of chairs and spent hours riding it.  I even served them lunch on the train.  We've also used our chairs to build LOTS of obstacle courses this week.  What fun!

 Holden kept yelling "choo choo!"  I love that I caught his little mouth in action!

Our favorite activity so far has been snow ice cream.  In this case there was a heavy emphasis on "ice."  Luckily, our fountain filled up with lots of the white stuff and Heath had just cleaned it out.  Clean snow galore!

My helpers added some milk, sugar and vanilla to the snow and mixed it up well...

I loosely used this recipe, although I just mixed until it got to the consistency we wanted...

The boys LOVED it!  They kept calling it sweet milk ice... they love these Horizon milk boxes and call them sweet milk.  It really was the same taste, just super cold!

Even when we can't go outside I have to keep my kids moving.  It's mass chaos otherwise.  We've had quite a few dance parties over the last few days...

And we did some cuddling together.  The boys think pulling the couch out into a bed is a super sweet treat.  We napped there today in front of the fire.  It was perfect!

They're forecasting more snow tonight and have already announced all area schools closed.  I've got one more ice activity up my sleeves, but then I'm out of ideas.  What do you do when you're stuck inside?