Entertaining the boys

It's a long winter in New Brunswick. It would be great if it was just snow. Snow I can handle. It's the cold, cold, cold of it all. Saint John has this freeze/thaw thing going on. It freezes like a deep freeze and then warms up enough again to snow, or rain which just freezes back into ice. Today for example is a royal mess. It's raining which is melting all the snow that fell last week, but the drains are covered over and the roads are flooding and the temperature is dropping again tonight which means we'll be in an icefield once again. I had no idea growing up out west that the rest of the country lived like this.
The trickest part about winter here is that it lasts so long and the kids get stir crazy. When the snow is nice play snow and it's not 40 below it's fine. We can go outside. We can go skating, or sledding, or build snowmen or just have fun in it. I wish it was like this more, but it's not. So we are housebound. So what do you do. Here are some ideas of things we have done to keep the boys happy, burn off some energy and keep them focused on something besides the fact that we are stuck in the house.
1 - they run...races up and down the hallway. They love it
2 - hide and seek. A classic.
3 - sock basket ball - take pairs of balled up socks. Set the laundry basket up as their target and let them shoot baskets
4 - hotter/colder treasure hunt - this works best with Elijah, Jeremy's too young to really get it yet
5 - play-do, never underestimate the energy they get out with this activity
6 - basement hockey
7 - basement baseball
8 - basement golf
9 - basement soccer (do you see a pattern here? - always good to have a place where there aren't any breakables around)
10 - mini car races in the hallway
11 - build the tallest duplo tower and then knock it over - or, just build a duplo village
12 - Simon Says
13 - dancing
14 - pretending to be something else, usually dinosaurs or elephants or cows

And then there are quiet things too

1 - create a craft
2 - baking
3 - reading stories
4 - make up stories
5 - looking at old pictures and telling their stories
6 - puzzles

and let's not forget the plethora of toys available to play with. The kids are great into pretending with toys right now. They love to play airport, cars, firefighter and rescue heroes.

We're trying to keep the TV off as much as possible, so having it on becomes a treat. Last night was a great example. The kids were cranky and I knew that I had to think of something interesting to keep their attention until betime. So I cooked a relatively neat supper, laid down a picnic blanket in the living room and called them in for a dinner and movie picnic. We watched Ratitouille which I'd never seen all the way through and the kids had only watched once before. After supper I popped some popcorn and made hot chocolate. It made for a really nice cozy evening. I know Elijah especially liked it because while I was making supper tonight he suggested that we do it again.