Mommy Challenge #4: Rainy Days

When I was a little kid, I loved rainy days.

And it wasn't because I wanted to stay inside all day, watch movies and eat ice cream (I saved those activities for my "sick Ali" days).  

I loved rainy days for other reasons...

:: They were the perfect opportunity to play basketball in the driveway (making me appear like an extremely hard core, dedicated female basketball player when all I really wanted was attention)

:: They were the perfect excuse to get as muddy and disgusting as I wanted knowing that warm towels, dry clothes and a heater vent were waiting for me inside

:: They were the perfect forum for my brother and I to bond through mud pie contests, who-could-find-the-largest-puddles-to-splash-in contests, and basically any other wet weather contests we could think of (we were hardly competitive...)

Getting dirty was my specialty

Rounding up mud pie materials

Unfortunately, however, rainy days aren't quite as glamorous as they once were...

Cute, I know...

But I gotta say - there's something about being an adult that turned the exciting feeling of being soaking wet into a feeling of being damp and disgusting.  

I don't know...maybe it's the mascara running down my face that I never had to worry about in my youth...or maybe it's because it seems to take much longer to defrost than it used to...or maybe...juuuuuuust maybe, it's the fact that I have a newborn.  

And while it was quite "thrilling" to get caught in a rain storm last week, it's not something I plan on us doing on a regular basis.  Abigail was a great sport, but I'm pretty sure she wasn't a huge fan of the rain pelting her car seat, the wind whipping us from side to side, or the fact I had her completely enclosed in what probably felt like a coffin caught in a monsoon.

All I can say is that I look forward to the day when rainy days are fun again...when Abigail and her someday siblings ask me if they can frolic around and make mud pies in our someday backyard or play hoops in our someday front yard...and I, being the loving and caring Mom that I am, will tell them to have fun, get as muddy as they'd like, and that I'll have warm, dry towels straight out of our someday dryer waiting for them at the front door.  

That will be a great (rainy) day!

For now, however, I'm open to rainy day suggestions...if you have any indoor activities that are fun on rainy days (with a newborn in mind), I'm all ears!