how old are your children and what activities do you with them for fun?

I have four kids from 21 years old to 11 years old. My oldest remembers the simplest things as the most fun. We live in upstate New York so the winters are long and cold. We used to fill spray bottles with colored water and spray-paint the snow outside. We also would play dress-up and make our own home movies. Those are still fun to watch. I would pull out old family photos and they would love to look at themselves as babies and look at Mom and Dad as babies. We would save as many magazines as we could, cut out pictures of people, furniture, hats, shoes - anything really. Then we would make a collage on a piece of cardboard of their make-believe houses, beach scenes, etc. We would blow up balloons, cover them in paper mache and make pinatas to decorate their rooms with. We had a wall map of the world and put pushpins wherever our families were living at that time. (Great geography lesson, which I always need lol) A long-term, continuing project was the Flat Stanley story where you read the Flat Stanley book, make a Flat Stanley doll and send him to family members. He spends times with them, they take pictures of him with the family in different places, and send the doll and pictures back to your kids. All kids love getting mail!! Hope these ideas are helpful. Good luck and enjoy your kids at these ages - the years go by too fast!

My son is 4 YO and I've had to get really creative too! He loves his trucks and cars, but misses being able to dig in the dirt... so what I did was take the legs off his sand box and put it on the floor of our basement and let him dig in there. We only put a little sand in there and a bunch of medium sized rocks and he can still play with his 'dig its'. It makes a mess, but I just vac it all up and it keeps him happy. Also, we have a large garage so if he's really ansty, we move the cars and let him ride his bike/scooter/skateboard in there. We also built him a really simple computer so he can play games on the computer - which helps when I need to work at my desk.

Hi, My kids are a bit older now, 18 down to 7. But one thing we would do when the weather was bad was have a baking day. The kids loved playing in the flour, and I have loads of stories of kids dumping a whole bag of flour on the floor, on each other. Also we made play dough and a dough that once dried could be painted. We had adventure days as well. I would hide something and give clues where to find it, if I had time I wqould set up traps. Also my kids would make up board games. One game they made was a giant snakes and ladders using those foam squares with the numbers on, my stockings as the snakes and cut out ladders, the kids were the pieces. That game went on for hours!! Sometimes though when we exhausted everything or exhausted me I would let them moan on about being board. On those days they would come up with the most incredible games and immaganative ideas to play. Sometimes I feel kids are over stimulalted and some time of being bored is good for them. It lets them use their own minds a bit. Take care

We didn't get much rain when my boys were growing up in Arizona, but I would arrange the furniture and use blankets to make an imaginary world that we would crawl through and have adventures. We would make coffee can ice cream, rolling it back and forth. We'd wad up paper and shoot baskets, play with balloons, make play doh, play with legos and cars, build "roads" with cardboard and tape and crayons that had stores and gas stations along the way. I'd print out coloring pages and we would do those, play word games like "would you rather (have a million bucks or a cute puppy)" or "what if?". They would help me bake cookies or a cake, look outside and make up stories about the rain. There were so many things to do! They would even help me plan the next week's menus and they'd learn about nutrition and make up recipes.

I had a great time when my kids were little. We played about every game too. We colored and did crafts and watched movies too! Maybe look for some things that are real rare, like making corn cob dolls, or paper dolls using magazines. A trip to the library was always fun and then we also had books to read when we got home. My daughter is almost 28 and we jsut had a mother daughter day just for fun!