One of Our Favorite “Toys” on a Rainy Day

All of a sudden…it’s raining. After a very dry winter, spring has finally brought us rain! I actually LOVE LOVE LOVE rain. I always have. I am an odd one who gets all excited when I wake up to clouds and gloom.

Except that this time the rain has come and  ruined our plans two weekends in a row.

Sigh.

Last weekend we made use of the rain and got a TON of spring cleaning done around the house (did you know that spring cleaning can be a great time to work on language skills? I’ll posting about that soon…). However we needed to set the kids up with some activities while we did some work that they couldn’t help us with..and that was when I remembered one of our most FAVORITE play items that we had stored in the garage.

My mom and dad got this for my daughter for her first birthday and we had it set up in our living room pretty much all the time for a whole year! It is similar to the Playhut Lil Explorers Megaland Jungle but ours is a little more simple.

We set it up for the kids and they had a BLAST playing in it. Then we put it away and enjoyed several days of sunshine and then BOOM! Rain again. So….up it went again!

Why do we love this? Because it keeps our kids out of our hair so we can watch a movie in peace entertained and provides opportunity for pretend play and learning as well as works on gross motor skills. Yeah, that’s it. 😉

I also love that the whole thing folds up and fits in a bag that you can store away for later. You could also set it up outside on a nice day! And because it has several different parts, you can set it up in several different ways and you can choose to use only some of the parts and store the others (depending on your available space). It comes with a bunch of the little plastic balls to you can make a ball pit…however our dog has eaten many of them so we don’t get them out much.

For a long time we also had our Step 2 slide in the house. Don’t be afraid to bring some of the indoor toys inside during the rainy/snowy season! I recently read a blog where they brought their sand/water table inside and filled it with colored rice to play with! how fun would that be?

What is your favorite indoor toy or activity? Tomorrow I am going to share another fun indoor activity that is GREAT for working on speech and language skills!

Cheers!