It has been downright freezing here in Chicago lately, which means we’ve been incredibly housebound with Miss H. For those of you with high energy toddlers, you know how difficult it can be to fill up the day with meaningful, fun activities! Here’s a roundup of what we’ve been doing to survive (beyond the obvious activities: books, music, blocks, play kitchen, etc):

Baking


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This probably comes as no surprise as I recently shared all of the baking we’ve been doing. But this has definitely been our top go-to activity since Christmas. It’s an activity that is teaching Miss H about rules and limits (“It’s a rule that you can’t put your hands in the batter.” “We must stir things gently so that we don’t spill all over the counter.”). It’s also an activity that can be stretched out into a long period of time: gathering ingredients (wherein we talk about each ingredient); smelling the different ingredients (cinnamon or garlic or whatever seasoning we’re using, also tasting when appropriate); measuring and mixing the ingredients; watching the final product baking in the oven; tasting what we’ve baked.

Putting Away Groceries (or other household items)
I wish I had a picture of Miss H trying to carry a pineapple! We have our groceries delivered when the weather is bad and that’s when we stock up on a lot of items (much more than if we shopped ourselves, as we don’t buy more than we can walk home with). So in the midst of our terrible weather, we had a huge grocery delivery. Mr. H had Miss H bring items one-by-one to me in the kitchen – bananas, canned goods, clementines (one by one), etc. She had fun carrying everything, it was a unique opportunity to explain the name of each item, and all of the back and forth and “heavy lifting” really wore Miss H out! This could easily be translated to other household activities, like putting laundry away (assuming you don’t care about things being neatly folded!).

Screen Time

I’m not a big advocate for screen time for Miss H, but because we’ve been stuck in the house so much she has started running around like crazy. She gets incredibly worked up, out of breath, and just won’t stop running laps around the house! So we’ve started a new little tradition of a movie, cuddled up under the covers. Because Miss H’s attention span is rather short, it only ends up being about 15 minutes of screen time before she is up and on the move again. This is just enough time for her to settle down a little bit and calm down. If we were in the midst of beautiful weather screen time definitely wouldn’t be on the agenda, but we’re in survival mode!

Cleaning


Miss H is a lean, mean, cleaning machine! Specifically, she loves to clean the floors. To support her endeavors we have recently shortened the Swiffer so that she can easily Swiffer all over the house (just un-twist the Swiffer pole and remove the center section). Miss H could easily spend a good 30 minutes on this activity, although we are working on explaining that she doesn’t need to Swiffer our rugs!

Right now we’re counting down the days until warmer weather, but in the mean time, these are a few of our go-to “keep our toddler occupied” activities.

What keeps your LO’s busy when you’re stuck inside the house?