Too cold outside? Get the snow inside your house!

It might seem a bit odd to talk about snow play for kids when the spring has just started, but here in Belgium the weather keeps surprising us, so who knows what’s to come next.

Beginning of last week we had once again a good amount of snow so I was determined to have some snow play with my kids before the snow was gone. As it was late, dark and cold I wasn’t ready to send the kids out, so I decided to get the snow inside. Below I’ll give you a summary of what happened over the next hour.

First we got in the snow inside in a big plastic box.

Next I threw in some toys from a role-play cooking & baking set and the kids got immediately started!

After about half an hour the snow was getting quite wet and sticky, so I removed the tools and went out to get a second round of snow. Coming back I thought to change the scene and get in a couple of Duplo cars and trucks. As you can imagine, Lukas was very excited about this and the two girls joined in as well.

Tough after while Victoria had enough of the cars and wanted to do some more cooking, and that quickly turned into a fight, so I had to split up the box and give each a side to play. Luckily Elena had left the game by then, so I didn’t need to split it in 3!

And after an hour or so of play, they spend a while with their hands over the heater to get them back to normal temperature …

Inviting the snow inside your house might seem like a very messy thing to do, but I was surprised that it ended up very ok. I think the trick was that:

1. I used a very big box so they had sufficient playing space and with a floor of tiles the drops of melted snow were easily cleaned. At the end of the day it’s only water!
2. On top, with so many tools and toys in the snow, they didn’t feel the need to throw snowballs through my living room 🙂

And the cool thing is that besides the big box, you don’t need any special stuff. Just throw in whatever toys you have laying around and which can stand some snow and water. It something different than the typical snowman or snowball fight, but equally fun!