Things To Do When It's SubZero Outside

A post today from Auggie. Because his mother is freshly frozen out of ideas on what to do when 7 below has us all imprisoned stuck inside. She just keeps making chili and crying.
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1 Watch the youngest play video games or whoever's the best at them. You can all watch around the campfire, super exciting (for one person). Quality entertainment but gets old fast. If you have two player games, that's fun, too. Old people don't get them as much, though.

2 Listen to music as a family or have a music party and see whose jams are the best. Sometimes listen to the radio like an old-timey family.

3 Watch movies and take turns voting on which ones you want to watch. You got to be careful if your dad doesn't know which movies to watch, like he thinks The Fugitive is family-value entertainment. But it's still sometimes fun to watch dumb movies you've never seen before like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. And it doesn't matter that Christmas is over because this movie is good anytime.

4 Draw. Look up fun drawing games. Google “Fun drawing games.” There's one where one person draws a part of something then passes it to the next person to draw another part of it and go around the table like that until everyone feels it's done, or something like that. Sometimes it doesn't work.

5 Do origami. Find some good stuff online. Like here's a good one.

6 Play board games.

 

7 Play card games. Play cards like Four Card is a favorite (no it's not but it's my dad's so he makes us and this is my way of complaining about it)

8 Draw again but this time use markers. 

9 Monopoly is a last resort, you don't want it to come to that though because of family fights and it never ends.

10 Read a book.
 

11 You can all sit under a blanket tent and talk. How life is going.

 

12 Talk about what you're gonna do when it's not so cold anymore.

P.S. No matter what, do NOT say "I have nothing to do" or your mom will give you something to do. Surprises like laundry, and carrying stuff to the basement.

P.P.S. We've made 12 of these already:

 

 

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Winter Thesaurus

I don't know about you, but some days, I feel plain old sorry for my children.

The things that they have to listen to that stumble out of my mouth. It makes me want to dig up and carry around my college transcripts to show them that once, yes, mama had a working brain. Today, by far, one of the most ridiculous sentences imaginable tripped out of my mouth. As I heard myself saying the last word, I could almost read my childrens' minds, Whatever happened to poor mama that makes her talk like that...

"It's so cold that the temperature outside is just making everything cold."

That's what I had to say to them about today's weather. It was too late to take a single syllable back and I vowed at that moment, never again. I am going to lexeme the heck out of an internet search and unearth every descriptor possible for the word *cold*,  with the Arctic blast as my witness, my children will never have their ears assaulted by the thudding crapshoot remnants of my once bountiful vocabulary.

Help yourself to the list below, my friends, and borrow heavily so that the next time you find yourself out on a blustery day worthy of A.A. Milne's imagination, the tender pinnae around you will get an icy treat:

inhospitable
unwelcoming
forbidding
cool
frigid
frosty
glacial
numb
chilly
freezing
shivery
benumbed
hypothermic
wintry
gelid
bleak
brisk
sharp
stinging
algid
biting
blasted
penetrating
piercing
polar
inclement
nipping
Siberian
severe
boreal
arctic
brumal
frore
snappy
raw

Since I live in Wisconsin, there will be no shortage of opportunity to run through this list at least four times over before we next see the blooms on our trees.

By which time, I'm sure I'll be uttering the most exquisite expression possible of life during a Midwestern winter, "I'm very cold."

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I'm taking part in NaBloPoMo, National Blog Posting Month. I'm publishing a blog post every day during November. It's never too late to start, so give it a try!