Snow Much Fun Day in Canada
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A winter trip to Canada was designed to give us a taste of winter. We got that in spades. Old Man Winter served up a blizzard delaying our trip to Montreal, but giving us even more time with our friends, and fellow blogger, the Poole’s. (Check out Amber’s blog: Poole It Together.)
Like us the Pooles have three kids. Our families are similarly spaced so when we are all together it’s like having three sets of twins. Sometimes this is a blessing with kids playing nicely and other times it’s total chaos.
So…how do you keep six kids occupied during a Canadian blizzard?
You raid the pantry and craft closet, hit Pinterest and just give it all a go.
PLAY IN THE SNOW
As soon as the Big Littles woke up they were chomping at the bit to jump into that snow! Amber is an expert in letting the kids play outside. She set the timer and sent them out the door. When the timer goes off they head back in to warm up and dry all their clothes.
There was so much beautiful soft snow piled high in drifts that we all had to get outside and play in it for a bit. The kids (with Jeff’s help) dug snow tunnels, made snow angels, went sledding, jumped from anything they could into the snow and threw snow balls.
They came inside totally soaked! Amber has this great dryer that helps dry boots, hats and gloves so quickly. When the boys are warm and ready to go out again all their gear is dry and ready to go. We were so impressed with this dryer we are thinking of getting one for our wet boots! (NL peeps…you need this!!)
Make Maple Candy
Visiting a Sugar Shack should be high on your list if you are visiting Canada in the late spring. We’ve been reading Little House in the Big Woods and the boys wanted to try making maple sugar candy just like in the book. We missed Sugar Shack season, but Amber had faith we could make our own candy.
We followed these instructions from the Happy Hooligans, but without a candy thermometer we had to sort of eyeball the syrup.
Amber elegantly rolled the first candy and then the rest of us were off. You won’t believe how easy this project is! I will be doing this again the next time we live somewhere that it snows.
Snow Ice Cream
We didn’t have sweetened condensed milk, so we followed this recipe from Give Me Some Oven. The kids loved stirring in all the snow. Jeff thinks we used too much snow so it wasn’t particularly sweet, but we had six kids to feed!
Everyone was pretty thrilled with this treat.
Make Pizza
The snow day cooking continued with Jeff leading a full scale pizza making operation in the kitchen. The kids took turns making their pizzas. Make Your Own Pizza is a perfect snow day activity because it takes a lot of time and each kid can make and eat their pizza in turns.
Play Dough
Since we were already making a mess of the kitchen we whipped up some play dough as well. Flour, Salt, Water and we were off. Amber even had some essential oils for us to put in the play dough. Plus she had plenty of cookie cutters which the Little Littles loved.
Crafts Galore
Amber has one of the best craft closets you have ever seen. The kids took full advantage turning the office into craft central. Kids just sort of rotated in and out of the craft area throughout the day. Sure it was a mess to clean up at the end of the day, but it was the perfect down time activity when the kids needed a break from each other.
YouTube
We pulled out the computer and ran through some of the hits on YouTube. We did Baby Shark, Freeze Dance and Cosmic Kids Yoga, much to the delight of the vast majority of the littles.
Movie
We popped a bunch of popcorn and turned on a kids movie for everyone to enjoy. The quiet was so welcome.
Microscope Time
Yes, we got out the microscope with the intent at looking at snow. We ended up looking at just about anything we could find from hair to egg shells.
Blogging
The Littles were napping, the Bigs were outside and the Middles were in the basement so we got a bit of blogging done. Mostly we just discussed plug-ins and hashtags, but we both felt pretty accomplished for doing some work on a snow day!
Board Games
We are huge board game fans! As soon as the kids were all tucked in for the night we played an adults-only round of Disney Animation Monopoly.
We survived!
Since we never have snow days in Florida, this turned out to be an amazing day in Canada. We came for winter and got it in spades! Plus, we loved all the extra time we got with the Pooles.
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