Snow Day Family Olympics

I have a confession to make: I dread snow days.

I’ve been reprimanded for this on more than one occasion…but…hear me out. Snow days mean we have been thrown off our routine. Being thrown off a routine is nothing for some kids. They just roll with the punches. And for some others, no routine means high anxiety, unexplainable emotions and a lot of stress. Our household deals with the latter. Snow days mean an additional day or two of tension and lots and lots of attitude. It’s been a frustrating winter for us with SIX full snow days, multiple two hour delays, one lunch time dismissal and four calendar days off school.

So last week as I was crawling into bed I realized that the weather was looking like a snow day the next day. Honestly, I cried. And then I decided that instead of let that snow day rule me, I was going to rule it. We were going to have our own family Olympics. Theo and I brainstormed real quick before bed and I felt like I had a good plan in place…it was super simple:

First, we all piled onto the couch and watched some of the previous years of the Winter Olympics. We watched some opening ceremonies and we watched some of the sports, since none of my kids even knew what half the sports were. To be honest…I didn’t know what half of them were, either! Haha!

Next up, we watched a video on YouTube of all the flags of the world, while I drew up a scoreboard!

The first challenge was for each person to design their own flag! We all got to work and this was one of my favorite parts of the whole day!

We each presented our flags and then the rest of the panel acted as judges and gave out scores.

I picked four events for the day. Well, that’t not true. I declared that there would be four events for the day and that each person had to plan one event! Of course, Tera had a lot of help from Daddy, but it was so much fun!

Mostly, we played minute to win it games, and there are TONS of ideas on Pinterest. This was a marshmallow shooter game.

You might also notice that I added an additional point system to our scoreboard for attitude. Throughout the day, I awarded people points based on their attitudes. It was a really great way to keep everyone in check!

We did a marshmallow shooter, a hopping on one foot competition, a baby food jar stacking competition and the flag design. I know there was one more but I literally cannot remember what it was!

Of course, a snow day would not be complete without going out to play in the snow!

After lasting an entire 35 minutes outside, we came back inside and thawed out. I started getting dinner ready while everyone else picked a movie to watch. We settled in for a family movie night and for dessert I made sugar cookies that were decorated with M&Ms like the Olympic Rings. I presented each sugar cookie in order of medalists. My kids thought it was cool, so I call it a win.

You guys…this day was 90% my attitude and 10% a little bit of work. I could have easily been grumpy all day and left my kids to their own devices (which would have been fighting or…devices). I’m so glad we took the time to have a fun time and kind of hit reset on all these snow days we have been having this winter!

What do you do with your kids when they have a snow day?

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