On Cabin Fever and Creativity

Since Wilf has been born, life has not been normal. And not just because we have a new baby. Firstly, there was the norovirus seeping through the house for a week (parenting low point - holding a breastfeeding baby with one hand, while using the other hand to hold back the hair of a child that is vomiting all over my bed - and all on the first night my husband went back to work after paternity leave!). Then there was the excitement of Christmas and New Year and the school holidays. And just when I thought we were finding our new normal, down came the snow.

It was so, so beautiful to wake up last Friday to total silence and the most magical glowing white when we opened the curtains. The children were so excited to build a snowman and throw snowballs and go sledging. Problem was, I know from experience, that after a relatively short time, small people start to feel the cold in their fingers and toes and that is the end of the snowy fun.

So, faced with a weekend of lots of indoor time (which is unusual for us) we decided to get creative and wrote a list of all the things we were going to do on the snowy weekend. Here it is:

We had a great time doing a combination of playing in the snow and having cosy indoor time. By Monday we'd done almost everything on the list, plus we threw an impromptu snow party for lots of our lovely neighbours, who came round to drink all the leftover Christmas booze while the children played.

All good stuff. Problem was, the snow came again on Tuesday. The school closed. The pavements were icy. The roads were slippery. The children were were done with the snow-related activities. So we were housebound again. And then again the next day.

So mama had to come up with two more days worth of indoor activities. Luckily, we have lots of young families on our street, so we had a bit of an anti-cabin fever social life going on. Pancake party one day, lunch and playing the next. And in between that, we played 'schools', we made sticker pictures, we did lots of dancing in the kitchen, we bought CBeebies magazines from the village shop and did all the activities in them, we read and read and read some more, and we built lots of things out of Lego.   

But the girls also did a lot of bickering and arguing and winding each other up. There were tears and tantrums and emotional meltdowns (and that was just me). I checked the weather forecast every hour, hoping for the thaw to kick in. I daydreamed about running around a big empty field. I even Googled 'emmigrating to Australia'. I was all mothered and cabin fevered out.

So although you were pretty and fun for a while, please melt now, snow. Please.