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Well, we in Houston could all feel it coming and now it has… HISD has closed school until March 30th and so we are looking at 18 days of entertaining kids without their usual diversions. No, this is definitely not the end of the world and we will be just fine. Thankfully, it’s the time of year when you can send the kids to the backyard and tell them to stay outside with pure peace of mind…

But since we in Houston also lived through Hurricane Harvey and the stuck at home period that followed, we also know that a lot of days without a lot of options to entertain the kids can make everyone in the house more than a little stir crazy…

As for me, I have an AmazonPrime cart filled with some new entertainment to help fill the hours. Here is what I loaded up on for round one of the Corona-Chaos as I am calling it…

Games

Sure we have plenty of games already, but since over the last 10 years, we have always had a little tyke in the house, the pieces for said games are who knows where. Besides, there is something exciting about the new for kids and most of the classic games we grew up with are less than $10.

My favorite as a kid was Clue and my kids are now old enough to enjoy it as well so that was my first pick. My daughter requested Quirkle on recommendation of her teacher and it looks like a great variation on dominos so that made it into my cart as well. We already have Eye Found It the Disney version and I highly recommend it if you have young kids or a wide age range – it’s a great cooperative game that has all working together to win. No competition between siblings for when things need to settle back a little…

On a personal level, I couldn’t resist the idea of playing some Harry Potter Trivial Pursuit with my ten year old – I mean, Trivial Pursuit is my all time favorite game and she and I are both Harry Potter fanatics… While I was at it, I figure this is also the time to replace the Wizard’s Chess board that her brother demolished – I mean we will have plenty of time for her to polish those chess skills. Maybe we can even teach her siblings…

Spot It is one that my kids love to play at my parents – a great quick paced matching game. And of course some Uno and a fresh deck of playing cards are both in order… we may be playing some Texas Hold ‘Em before all is said and done…

Puzzles

Puzzles are something that we never think to do as a family here but whenever one is out we all get sucked into it. I found a range of puzzles from ones for the 3-5 age range all the way up to one or 2 giant adult puzzles. Likely this will be out while movies are going on in the background but at least it will keep us from being total vegetables when we need to all have some not talking to each other time.

Tangrams

Y’all, my kids have always loved these sort of problem solving things. It’s like Tetris in real life. We have a few travel version that we bring on the planes but I found some for the younger kids — they won’t even realize they are sharpening their math skills.

Art Supplies & Playdough

My mother would likely disown me if I didn’t include at least a few fresh art supplies for entertaining the kids. Fresh watercolors and watercolor paper, some oil pastels and child since then haven’t played with those mediums before and it would not be complete without fresh playdough… We also may do some play dough making of our own but it’s never bad to have some ready to go.

So this is round one over here… Let me know what you are stocking up on or planning to do over these next days in the comments below…

XOXO