The IDEA of winter with a toddler is a glorious one.
Your days will be full of wondrous activities, such as:
-romping outside in the fresh snow every day
-building snowmen
-drinking hot chocolate
-reading books by the fire
-and cuddling under blankets together.
Ah, sweet winter bliss.
The reality of winter with a toddler?
-spending 1.5 hours attempting to put on a single pair of gloves
-repeating the phrase, “Yes, you need a jacket; it’s minus fifteen outside!” until the words no longer hold meaning
-waking up at 6AM to your toddler asking, “Playground now?” Every. Single. Day.
-texting your partner to pick up pizza and a treat on the way home because your child is “in a mood” again
-and basically spending most of your time trapped in your home and relating FAR too much to Emma Donoghue’s novel, Room.
Surviving winter with a toddler is tough. But it can be done!
I’ll show you exactly how you can not only survive winter stuck indoors with your rambunctious toddler, but how you can THRIVE while doing so!
Here is the ultimate guide you NEED for surviving winter with your toddler!
First, let’s break it down into a few categories since it’s a hefty topic.
1.) INDOOR ACTIVITIES
This is going to be the bread and butter of this post, since you’ll likely be spending most of your time trapped within 1,000 square feet, give or take a few hundred (oh hey, fellow apartment dwellers! *goes to give high five but trips over 15 bins in way, breaks nose*).
Indoor activities are the things that will save you from having your daily 4PM weeping session in the closet while your toddler sings “Happy Birthday” on repeat and sprinkles the dog’s food on the floor.
2.) OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES
Yup, you’re still going to have to venture outside every once in awhile, even if it is ungodly cold out there. Because fresh air is good for you, or something.
3.) MENTAL HEALTH
That’s right, ladies: I’m talking SELF-CARE! *face contorts into grimace and arms automatically begin searching for nearest face mask to apply*
Okay, I see you rolling your eyes at the whole “self-care” thing and I get it. I feel it, too.
But there’s way more to self-care than bubble baths and manicures, and you’re gonna need a whole lot of it this winter. So let’s do it up, the Ma Hag way.
All right. Deep breaths, everyone. Grab your biggest, warmest sweater and your sweatpants with the saggiest ass, and LET’S DO THIS.
1.) INDOOR ACTIVITIES TO HELP YOU SURVIVE WINTER
The forecast says that temps are dropping, yet your toddler’s energy levels are climbing sky-high.
What’s a sleep-deprived, moderately-patient, stunningly good-looking parent to do?!
A whole lotta indoor activities, that’s what. And probably a good amount of stress-eating.
SENSORY PLAY
Yes, your child has plenty of toys for indoor playing. But trust me when I say that all of those toys will be despised by week two of house arrest. (And you will despise them, too. Oh yes, you will.)
So here’s where we up our game with SENSORY PLAY.
Sensory play is any kind of activity that stimulates your child’s senses. Activities that focus on sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, and ones that also encourage movement.
Kids tend to LOVE sensory play, because it’s exciting, different, and often messy.
Parents tend to shy away from sensory play because it’s exciting, different, and often messy.
But we need to bust out the big guns for these snowy days. Plan a sensory activity a day, and you’re GOLD.
My go-to sources for sensory play ideas come from The Salty Mamas, and of course, Pinterest.
A few tried and tested (and EASY!) ones that are sure to please include:
-Grab a few magnets and some cookie sheets, and let your toddler go to town. (via Salty Mamas)
-Fill a large container with oats (or dry pasta, or popcorn kernels, or whatever dry ingredients you have in your kitchen) and make a little play space for all of your child’s tiny toys! (via Everyday Chaos & Calm)
Also note that a vacuum should really be listed in the ingredients because you will need one after approximately 30 seconds. All in good fun, right? ALL IN GOOD FUN.
This one is especially great if your dog has been lacking in sensory play lately, like mine.
-Make moon sand using just three ingredients! (via Parenting Chaos)
It’s soft, fluffy, and kinda sticky, and a whole lotta fun for toddlers.
This particular session ended poorly because I was unable to make the actual moon, but I really should have anticipated that request.
If you want to veer off the beaten path, I’ve developed a few of my own sensory play ideas.
-Stinky, Slimy, Yucky, Grimy!
Head into the kitchen with your toddler, and examine all of the rotting produce together.
“See this slimy brown lettuce? This piece here, and here? Go ahead, touch it. Yucky! That’s because Mommy is terrible at New Year’s resolutions and only eats bread all day long!”
Kids love this one because it’s a treat for all of the senses: they can see the sludge of rotted romaine, feel the prickly overgrown eyes of a forgotten potato, and inhale the indescribable stench of a blackened banana that was discovered in a cereal box in the back of the cupboard.
-Toy Town!
Gather every single one of your child’s toys and place them in the middle of the living room.
Now ask your child to sort them into various categories: toys that feel soft, red toys, toys that make noise, big toys, small toys, etc.
Ask her questions: “Does this toy feel soft, or hard? Let’s see,” or “Is this toy quiet, or earsplittingly loud? Can we listen together?”
Your child will likely ignore you entirely and begin to play with a paper towel roll that she found under the couch.
Leave the large pile of toys in the middle of the living room for the next four months, or until the dog has destroyed them all, whichever comes first.
-Mama Polo!
(Note: this game takes a bit of prep work, but the end result is worth it.)
Over the course of several months, allow all of the lightbulbs in your home to burn out, one by one. DO NOT REPLACE THEM! Soon your home will be enveloped in darkness. This is exactly what you need.
Once the last bulb has finally fizzled out, hand your toddler a flashlight (decorating the flashlight with stickers beforehand is always fun!) and the game of Mama Polo begins!
Much like the classic swimming pool game, your toddler will call out, “Mama!” and you reply in turn, “Polo!” from your hiding spot within the darkened abyss (I find the bed, pantry, and deep within a bubble bath to be excellent hiding spots).
Does this mean I’ll have to live in complete darkness for all of winter, you ask?
Yes! Yes, it does. It’s guaranteed weeks of fun. Plus, there’s the added bonus of never having to see how messy your house is becoming! (Just know: it’s a filth-hole.)
And when every other sensory play project fails, there’s always BUBBLES!
Just blow bubbles freakin’ everywhere. Hours and hours of bubbles. Never stop. Hardwood floors be damned.
Not feeling the sensory play? No problem. Here are a few other fun and simple ways to add a bit of excitement to your day:
-Mix up your routines!
It’s so easy to become bogged down with boredom and routine when you’re stuck inside all day, every day.
Try changing little parts of your day. You’d be surprised at what a big impact even a small change can make!
For example:
-Spruce up your meals with a fun little surprise: a dash of whipped cream on your toddler’s pancakes. A sandwich cut into a fun shape. A make-your-own pizza bar for dinner. A delicious smoothie for dessert that you make together and drink out of a fun cup!
-Do breakfast for dinner! Or no dinner at all! Or just snack continuously from sunrise on the first day of winter until sundown on the last day and never be without food in your grasp!
-Give your toddler her bath at 4:30AM instead of 6PM!
-Spend two months secretly creating your own Winnie the Pooh costume, working into the wee hours of the night. When completed, rise at dawn and surprise your toddler with a good morning wake-up from one of her moderately-liked characters!
-Decide to put your house on the market without consulting your partner, just for fun!
Okay. So you’ve done your sensory play project and you have a potential buyer for your house who unfortunately lives overseas but can e-transfer you the down payment today, sight unseen, as soon as you provide your banking info (Score!).
How do we use up the rest of the hours in the day?
STARTING A MAJOR PROJECT
There is absolutely NO reason why you can’t be productive when stuck indoors with your toddler!
By working together with your child, you can use this time wisely to achieve your goals.
Have you been thinking about decluttering?
Excellent idea! Everyone knows that clutter is destroying our lives!
Take it one room at a time, and ask your toddler to help you go through items. This is a great opportunity to teach your child important life lessons, like providing for the less fortunate.
I encourage you to start a dialogue and involve your child in the process, perhaps something like:
Parent: “Do you think we need this Tupperware?”
Toddler: “Yes.”
Parent: “What about this dish towel? We have so many. Do you think someone else could use it instead?”
Toddler: “Me. I want. Mine.”
Parent: “And we probably don’t need to keep your stick, rock, leaf, AND second rock collection, do we?”
Toddler: “I take it. Go outside now?”
Parent: “Hmmm, we don’t really use this decorative tin much, do we?”
Toddler: *eating decorative tin*
And just take it slowly!
This will be a long process.
Stick to it, and by the end of winter, you will have gathered a small grocery bag’s worth of items to donate, and your toddler’s toy collection will have grown to include a plastic punch bowl, four pot holders, a pair of your pre-baby jeans that you will never once wear again, an old clock, and a rice cooker.
-Have you always wanted to become a better artist?
Totally doable!
First step: narrow your focus.
Would you like to improve your painting skills? Pottery? Life drawing? Coloring with with tiny hunks of broken crayon? The world is your oyster!
Once you’ve decided your area of focus, work on it a little bit every day.
Set realistic goals:
”I wish to complete every drawing in my toddler’s coloring book by the end of winter. AND NO TRACING!”
”My goal is to set up an Etsy shop comprised of Roman Emperor busts that I have sculpted from Play-Doh.”
“I would like to work on my painting skills and also mostly just figure out how to remove the blue Crayola finger painting soap stains from the bathtub.”
You got this, girl!
-Is potty training in your future?
If your toddler is showing the signs, winter can be the perfect time to start potty training! You’re stuck indoors anyway, right?
There are lots of different methods for potty training, so do some research on what you think will work best for you and your child.
Spend many hours reading about potty training online, and order at least four different books off of Amazon.
Read them all.
Eat all of the M&M’s yourself.
Decide to postpone potty training when your toddler insists on wearing potty as a hat.
Continue rewarding yourself with M&M’s for successfully going to the bathroom for the next six years.
-Do you dream of becoming an author one day?
Let me just say, I LOVE this goal and believe it’s 100 percent attainable, even at home with a toddler!
There are so many ways you can work on your writing skills while stuck indoors with your child.
You can:
-Write a story together about something silly that happened that day.
-Ask your toddler to tell YOU a story, and write it down, adding your own details.
As a personal example, a goal of mine has always been to write a film script.
I decided that THIS would be the winter when I would finally do it. NO EXCUSES!
I worked on my script every free minute I had: I woke up early, stayed up late, and typed like a madwoman throughout nap time.
It was only when I had a mental breakdown from no sleep and they found me in my Winnie the Pooh costume in the park looking for honey in a tree and made me go on a retreat for a few weeks that I realized there were plenty of working hours during the day!
I simply allowed my toddler to help me with the dialogue for one of my main characters, and it practically wrote itself!
Here is a small excerpt from my film noir, tentatively entitled, “The Train Arrives at Nap Time.”
Keep an eye out for it in the 2020 festival circuits!
2.) OUTDOOR ACTIVITIES TO HELP YOU SURVIVE WINTER
Yes, I know it’s cold and that it is physically impossible to get everyone dressed in winter gear without a meltdown over snow pants. I know.
But when you have a day nice enough for escaping the house, YOU BETTER TAKE IT.
Trust me. A good romp in the snow, or a nice brisk stroll outside, or even a quick run to the coffee shop will do wonders for your sanity and your toddler’s energy levels. Plus, it’s fun!
Need a few ideas on what to do outside?
EXCITING EXCURSIONS TO HELP YOU SURVIVE WINTER
-Head to the park and build snowmen!
-Go in the backyard and try to catch snowflakes on your tongues!
–A day trip to the aquarium!
Kids love fish!
-Swing by the local library for story time!
Kids love places where you’re supposed to be quiet!
-Ditch the stroller and take your child on a sled ride around the block!
Great for exercise, and also for completely destroying your lower back.
-A visit to the pet food store!
Ask your child to find all of the pictures of dogs, cats, birds, and other animals, and also to guess if your debit card will be accepted or declined when you pay for your dog’s grain-free, restricted diet, organic food!
-Head to your local bank for your child’s first lesson in finances!
Ask the teller to explain to your child the fundamental concepts behind currency and the basic tenets of the stock market while you sit down and enjoy a cup of free coffee and 30 peppermints.
-Wander the grocery store and loiter in the baked goods department until the manager asks you to leave!
Seeing your toddler enjoy the snowy outdoors is probably the best part of winter, so dress warmly and get out there as much as you can!
Seriously.
Get. Out. Of. The. House.
3.) MENTAL HEALTH
Girl, you need to take care of yourself this winter.
Because parenting is hard on the best, most fun, sunniest of days, and on these long-ass, bleak, dark-by-4:30PM-kinda days? It can be downright brutal.
SAY IT WITH ME: The Sweet Valley High TV show did NOT measure up to the books SELF-CARE IS YOUR FRIEND.
Here are a few helpful ideas for self-care this winter:
-Set your morning alarm for one hour earlier than usual!
Wake up early so you can enjoy brushing your teeth, urinating, pouring a hot cup of coffee, and sitting down at the kitchen table for three minutes before your toddler rises and calls out, “Mama! My sock fell off again!”
-Have quality time with your partner in the evenings after bedtime!
Are the kids FINALLY in bed? Great! Now it’s time to relax.
…Just as soon as you finish the dishes, wipe down the kitchen, prep the coffee, walk the dog, and answer a few emails.
Get cozy on the couch with your partner and snuggle and talk about your days, or aimlessly scroll through Netflix for an hour before selecting the episode of The Office where Michael and Jan have a dinner party for the 500th time.
Continue watching episodes until it is so, so very late and you regret all of your decisions.
Repeat nightly.
Serenity by Jan.
-Hydration, hydration, hydration!
Drinking water is so important to keep you feeling your best.
If you don’t dig the taste of plain water, jazz it up a bit!
Try infusing your water with:
-a slice of lemon or lime
-fresh berries
-sliced cucumber
-a few mint leaves—refreshing!
-a hunk of dark chocolate (for the antioxidants)
-a dusting of finely crushed Oreos on the rim of your glass
-a slice of New York-style cheesecake
-a large pizza (NOT DEEP DISH)
And remember, aim for eight 8-ounce glasses a day!
The Toblerone ridges work especially well.
-Dress to Impress!
We’ve all heard the classic stay-at-home mom advice to get dressed into real clothes every day, no matter how tired you’re feeling, because sweatpants=big slug and actual pants=somewhat human-like.
Now, this might work in warmer months, but when you’re in the dead of winter and your toddler just informed you that you “look like a mean monster,” I find it takes a bit more than leggings to feel like a functioning member of society.
We need to up the ante.
So forget about the leggings. Don’t waste your time with jeggings. Jeans? Effing useless. BURN EM.
We need to put on PROPER clothes.
I’m talking a fine cashmere sweater. A quilted vest. Some kind of breeches. A suede tunic. Your old Halloween costume, perhaps. Do you still have your wedding dress? Put. It. On.
Instant sophistication. Also, it tends to frighten your child just a bit, which can sometimes work in your favour.
-Put some extra effort into your beauty regime!
Winter=dry, rough, scaly skin.
Purchase an excessive amount of body lotion, even though you currently have at least ten almost-full bottles at home. Slather yourself with lotion constantly, especially when you feel those stress levels rising.
Pick a powerful phrase or mantra that you whisper to yourself while slathering.
“I am beautiful and strong.”
“I feel the peace and embrace the love.”
“I am exactly where I need to be.”
I like to whisper, “Sticky, Slimy, Yucky, Grimy” while I slather. Yes, I realize that this may be confusing because it is also the name of the popular sensory game, but rest assured it easily doubles as a powerful mantra.
-Is the loneliness catching up to you? Text or Skype with a friend for a quick chat.
Are all of your friends avoiding you since you smell overwhelmingly of Dollar Store lotion and you’re constantly whispering strange things to yourself?
Whatever. It’s fine. You don’t need them anyway.
Have a chat with your REAL friends instead. The ones who are always there for you, greasy sheen or not.
“So then I went and I bought MORE lotion! Hahaha! It’s Aquatic Mist.”
With all of that slathering and hydrating in your finest apparel, there’s no way you can’t feel great!
Here are a few more ways to improve your mental health this winter:
PERSONAL CHALLENGES
Winter is the perfect time to do some inner reflection and try to better yourself, both as a parent and a person.
Every day, think of something that you’d like to work on—your patience, the amount of push-ups you can do, a new recipe, learning a new language, anything!
Need some inspiration?
Here are a few challenges that I’ve undertaken in winters past:
-Can you consume your entire day’s worth of calories before 8AM on a Tuesday? (Sure can!)
-How many cups of coffee can you drink before smashing your mug on the counter and declaring “EFF IT, I’M CUTTING BANGS”? (FYI, the answer is 12.)
-Can you manage to perform six crunches before your toddler notices and sits on your stomach? (Impossible. It can’t be done.)
-Do you have the stamina to watch the entire True Crime section of Netflix before winter ends? (You bet your bippy.)
-Can you publicly declare that you’re going sugar-free for the winter and then continue to consume vast amounts of sugar as per usual? (No comment.)
-Are you able to sit and smile patiently for the entire seven hours of your toddler attempting to put on her own gloves?
“You’re doing great, honey. Mama’s just so very hungry and tired because it’s almost midnight now.”
Rest assured that you can turn almost anything into a personal challenge!
And remember, the goal here is to have something fun to help get you through those long winter days.
Something to keep your mom brain at bay, and to make you feel like you’re working towards a task other than the title of Official Cheese Fetcher.
Winters are tough, and winters when you’re stuck inside with a toddler can be downright brutal.
Just take it one day at a time, friends, and embrace the chaos.
Build the snowmen, play with the rotted produce, cut the bangs, wear the wedding dress, and do whatever you need to do to get through the day while having some fun. Because as tough as it is, it’s a pretty special time for you and your toddler, too.
What are YOUR best tips on surviving winter with your toddler?
Do you have a go-to sensory play activity? What kind of cheesecake do you put in your water? Do you have a personal mantra that you like to whisper when slathering yourself with lotion?
I wanna hear it all!
I lol’d so much reading this!
Thank you
I’m so happy to hear it, Sara! I hope my madness came in handy for you! 🙂