Summer is a fun time of year, when the boys get to run around outdoors, play, and enjoy fun outdoor activities. Unless it’s raining. Beautiful, warm, rainy summer days are still wonderful (any day that is warm is wonderful to me), but they alter the ways the boys can have fun. At least outdoors. Indoors, they grab their gadgets or a board game or anything close by, and still manage to have fun, and all those yummy outdoor summer treats (like lemonade, watermelon, and ice cream) taste just as good indoors when it’s drizzling out.
There is no reason for boredom because of the weather, but my kids don’t like long breaks during the day with nothing to do either, so yes, they are playing with their Nintendo Switch while it charges ;-), and yes, they are watching YouTube play throughs to help them advance in the game, at the same exact time as they play. They’ve become as addicted as my husband to watching gamers playing on YouTube so reveal secrets and tricks that help them when they play.
If you are looking for activity ideas for rainy summer days with kids, here are all the things we’ve done on the four rainy days we’ve had so far:
1. Put a large, complicated puzzle together as a family. We love small piece puzzles with thousands of pieces that take us weeks to complete, and when we are done we glue the back and mount it to display (so of course, we tend to choose scenic puzzles or a fine art jigsaw puzzle).
2. Pick a board game and keep it going as long as it takes to crown a winner! My sons love Monopoly (we have four different versions, including Spaceopoly), and I love Scrabble. We also have shorter games, like Operation, and learning games, like Boggle, Yahtzee, Memory, and Trouble.
3. Break out one of your subscription toys (KiwiCrate and Mel Science are two great ones) and put it together.
4. Have an indoor battle with Nerf guns (they are foam tipped) or dart challenge
5. Watch fun kids movies (you wouldn’t want to waste a sunny summer day sitting in front of the boob tube, but those rainy days are perfect for this). They love to watch funny sports movies, particularly with a group of kids on an underdog team who manage to come out ahead, or who live together in the same neighborhood and enjoy pickup games while getting into silly scrapes.
As for me, my computer recently crashed (I have a pretty new iMac Pro and was stunned that the hard drive just “failed”). It acted wonky for a couple of weeks, shutting off randomly, failing to load my favorite programs (like Lightroom), and it made it hard for me to share much about what we are up to. The computer was no longer under the one year warranty anymore, and it was at the Genius Bar for about a week awaiting new parts while I stressed and missed it and struggled to work from an iPad (you can’t edit photos well on an iPad, or at least I can’t). Luckily the team at our local Apple store really tried to help out and speed it up, so after two weeks of being symptomatic, and a third week in the Apple hospital, my computer is back home. I reinstalled my favorite programs, and am almost completely back up and running, and am looking forward to the rest of summer having fun with my family (whether it rains or not).
friends, when we are home, I take pictures without thinking about how messy the area is or how many toys are strewn about… sorry for the mess ❤️