Me and my gang

There have been a lot of great summer days here in Michigan. But not all. Some days are cool, gray, and just a tad depressing. On those days we are burdened with staying inside and coming up and with stuff to do. Megan isn't quite ready to settle in and watch 4 straight hours of the Tour de France or British Open like I am. So we get creative.

One day I decided to turn our two club chairs opposite each other and throw the blankets over the top creating a make-shift fort (I'd like to thank Matt George for doing this about a year ago for giving me the inspiration). I think it turned out alright but she'll have to wait until we replace the washer/dryer or some other major appliance that comes in a huge cardboard box before we can upgrade.

But we loved it. She liked being inside of it while I peeked in. She liked running around the chair and coming back inside of it to me. She liked Espen poking his nose in it and scaring her. And I just liked her giggles.

My other brilliant idea was to supervise arts-n-crafts time. We bought her some crayons that come in these great holders for little kids. They basically take up her entire hand so she can actually hold it. Selfishly I was doing this to see if she truly was showing some left-handed tendencies. Everything she does is with a dominant left hand, so I assumed that would be the case with her scribbling.

Not quite. She used both of her hands to scrawl, smack, slam, and occasionally draw colored lines on the paper. We even had a few aborted attempts to put the crayon in her mouth. And while I'm still not sure which hand she'll end up writing with or if she'll become the next Jackson Pollack, I'm glad she had the time to practice the skill of 'writing'.

In both cases, I had a lot of fun with my baby girl and they are definitely two games we'll be adding on some future nasty day.