Your guide to activities and fun things to do with your preschoolers, toddlers and kids in Indianapolis, IN

Personally I think any activity that carries a chance of frostbite is considered  not fun. Take a little person along and the not fun factor is multiplied by two.
One thing I learned when coming to Indiana is there are a lot of days during the winter spent inside. It forced me to become creative so that my daughter and I wouldn't be sitting in opposite corners screaming at each other when my husband walked through the door. Over three winters spent in Indiana I've come up with a few boredom busters for when the weather outside is frightful.

• Bad weather activity box. Collect all those stickers you get in the mail, save all those random ribbons that show up from nowhere. Make a trip to the dollar store for coloring books, stickers, glue, pom poms and glitter (uh, if you trust your kids that much.)  Save it all in a lidded bin and when the weather turns nasty pull out the box and let your kids go crazy sticking, decorating, cutting and making. We always like to make cards for grandparents and take the short chilly walk to the mailbox together.
• Along the same lines of the activity box, a box full of play-doh (cheap!) and fingerpaints can be lots of fun. Cookie cutters and plastic, plastic untensils and stamps make play-doh even more fun. Seriously, when's the last time you plunked down and fingerpainted or made ladybugs out of play-doh? It's fun, promise. Besides, do you have somewhere better to be?
• Do you remember how to cut out a paper snowflake? Or paper dolls? I didn't either, enter google. Hundrends of sites of how to make and cut things out of paper. Also hundreds of sites with coloring pages, print some out, or tear pages out of a coloring book and tape them up on the wall. Your kids will think "coloring on the wall" is awesome.
  
• With it getting dark so much earlier children's natural attraction to things that make light is a perfect match. Hide you childs stuffed animals around the house, turn out the lights and hunt them down with a flashlight. Make shadow puppets on the wall, play flashlight hide and go seek. Everything is more fun with flashlights.
• Have stairs? Blow bubbles from the top to your child down below. Sit at the bottom and have your child roll a tennis ball to you. Find a long sturdy piece of cardboard and make a slide down three or four stairs (we had a TV box last year that served HOURS of indoor slide on the stairs fun.)
• Find some foam balls or pull out the beach balls and go crazy with them in a hallway, the stairs or the living room, Take down anything that may get knocked over and bounce, roll, kick and throw them to you heart's desire. We have yet to break anything in our house after three years of indoor beach ball.
• Have hardwood or tile floors? Let your kids ride their bikes inside. We push our kitchen table out of the way and set up an obstacle course for our daughter with laundry baskets and chairs.
• Bring outside in. Do you have a smaller plastic outdoor slide/playhouse? Rinse it off and bring it into your living room. Sure it takes up a lot of space, but if you have a climber it could be your saving grace when they have something to crawl on and around that isn't your kitchen table or the dog.
• Behold the power of hiding spots. Set up a card table or a couple of chairs and cover it with a sheet or blanket. It can become anything from a fort to a castle, a cave or a spaceship. Same goes with giant boxes. 
• Make something easy, brownies, cookies, quick bread or rice krispy treats and take it to a neighbor. It may be cold outside, but getting out, even if for a minute will do a lot for your spirits.
  

Beign stuck inside can be a little exhausting and overwhelming, but if you're prepared with fun and original things that are a little out of the norm you and your kids will have a lot more fun on snow days.