Wisconsin Winter with twin toddlers part 1

So, technically "winter" hasn't even started, right? How can that be??? 20 inches of snow outside and its still 'Fall'? So far, Nicholas and Celia have done decently well with being inside all the time. They both loved being outside all spring, summer and early Fall. However, with snow 20 inches deep they can't even walk in it and I can't exactly carry them through it.
So, this week I have tried to come up with some new activities. Some silly, some educational.

1. We took the 2 tunnel tubes and taught them to go inside of them and hold on the edges and walk (in the video a bit). I even got them to pretend we were playing 'Wack a Mole'. They would stand in the tunnels and I would bop their heads and they would hop down.

2. We started to practice shapes. I took a bunch of index cards and drew a circle with a marker on each one. They then colored the circles. Then we took tape and taped circles all over the house. They did an awesome job recalling where all the circles were. Its kind of like a Shape hide n seek. After a week or so of circle, we'll do a new shape.

3. I took 6 index cards and made 2 red circles, 2 green circles, and 2 yellow circles. I laid them out of the floor and asked "Find a red circle" (we are also working on color identification). Once they found a red circle then I'd ask "Find another red circle". Then once we had the 2 matching red circles we would count "one. Two". So we were learning: colors, matching and counting. Nicholas seems to do a little better than Celia right now, but tonight I was doing it only with her and she was catching on more.

4. Played "Follow the leader (mommy)" around the house. Man, that wears you out!

5. Trying to do more finger plays and songs. They can both do 'Sticky Sticky Bubble Gum" (I'll have to get that on video since its not a common one). So we were really working on 'Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "I've got music in me" (a Greg and Steve Song). They also really like "Peanut Butter and Jelly" song.

6. Purposely reading books before nap time. We do read a lot throughout the week, but I'm trying to make sure we get more books in each day. I need to go through my tubs of books in the basement and get some new ones. I think we're getting a little bored with the circulation right now. Maybe a trip to the library soon too.

7. Having them jump on their trampoline a lot while we sing to music. I'm happy we got them a trampoline. Their little hearts are pounding when they get off and they giggle and laugh when they jump. They can both hold on to the rail at the same time and jump. It was an early Christmas gift and I'm glad we did it. It goes up to 100 lbs.

8. I took a shoebox and cut a slit on the top. Then gave them cards to slip in the slit. Then we took some other objects like blocks, cars, etc and tested to see if any other things fit in the slit. They really gave it a good effort to fit those things through a little slit. So they were learning that some things are "too big" to fit in there. Its amazing how simple toddlers think!

9. More time doing play-dough. Water color painting has been a disaster lately. They paint their skin, not the paper!

10. N&C and I went through some magazines and cut out pictures and taped them on to plain wooden blocks. Nicholas picked 4 pictures of cars and Celia picked 3 pictures of babies and we taped them on with mailing tape. Just makes playing with wood blocks more fun. Another idea is taking full length pictures of family members, printing them out, and then taping them on the blocks so that they can play with family member blocks. :)

Here is a video of them playing around the other night.