Oh, those rain-day blues. I'm sure you can remember when you were a kid, sitting by the window with your brothers and sisters watching the rain pouring down. Some times the rain lasted for a couple of days and you thought it would never stop raining.

I've thought about those times quite often since becoming a parent and my husband agrees that some of the fondest memories from our childhoods were spent together with our families on those foul-weather days. All the kids would sit at the dining room table playing marathon games of Monopoly or the game of Life. But you can only take marathon games of Monopoly for so long before boredom sets in and you end up with a household of kids complaining that "there's nothin' to do".

As our sons grew older, we talked about putting together a secret rainy-day box. It would be filled with all the fun stuff we did as kids when the weather kept us in the house. I have to admit, my husband had a great amount of fun putting this together. I secretly think he was looking forward to a couple of rainy, nasty, cold days.

The first item in the box was a candle making kit and it's an activity that his brother and sisters fondly remember. My husband's family would have a few of the next door neighbor's kids over and they would make candles all day. It's a perfect item to create just in case you lose power and our sons just love stirring the wax as it melting (adult supervision is a must-wax fires are extremely dangerous) and mixing in the colors. For over three years, my husband has been picking up all the broken crayons and storing them and now I know why - they work better than the colors that come with candle kits!

My favorite rainy-day activity is making crafts. We have beads for mosaics, sea shells from the beach that we paint. We also bought simple picture frames that we decorate and both of our sons gave each of their teachers a custom picture frame for the holidays.

Along with board games, we have decks of cards, a chess and checkers set and still in the box is my husband's favorite - a huge jar of old pennies and three coin-collecting books. One rainy weekend when my husband was about six years old, his grandfather presented him with two brand new penny books and they spent hours together (and many weekends after) going through the many jars his grandfather saved along the years. For my husband this stands out as one of his fondest memories... spending hours filling those coin books with his grandpa.

We also have the assortment of coloring books, a couple boxes of model cars and airplanes to build and pages of plastic sheets for the boys to put their Pokemon collections in (once they sort them). My husband also has a bunch of his old baseball and football cards for the three of them to go through one day and I added several skeins of yarn and a couple of looms to knit with.

We have to keep watch for any sign of bad weather now, so we can stock up on food. It seems that the word is out and we often have a couple of the neighborhood kids calling to see if we are pulling out the "cool box of things to do". Foul weather usually means all day Monopoly marathons, followed by crafting and candle-making after dinner.

It's amazing that the TV and video games aren't the main attractions on these days. We hope that our boys look back on these days and share them with their children when they become adults. I also hope we can keep the kids interested with the next activity that comes out of the "cool box".
Oh, the pressure of those rainy-day blues!

Learn more about this author, Robin Steffens.
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