You had plans.
Then you looked out of the window.
The garden is soaked, the park is out and everyone is suddenly trapped indoors asking what you’re doing today.
Putting the TV on is absolutely allowed. We’re not here to suggest eight wholesome hours of uninterrupted family bonding while everyone wears matching knitwear.
But if you’ve reached the third episode of something nobody was particularly watching anyway, it can be handy to have a few other ideas.
Here are eight rainy day family activities that require varying amounts of effort, very little forward planning and, importantly, might actually be fun.
Rainy days are not the time for precision patisserie.
Pick something everyone can get involved with. Biscuits to decorate, cupcakes with far too many sprinkles, homemade pizzas or anything involving a bowl that someone is eventually allowed to lick.
Younger children can pour, mix and decorate while older children can weigh ingredients and follow more of the recipe themselves.
Will your kitchen look better afterwards?
Absolutely not.
But you’ll have something to eat, you’ve filled an hour or two and there’s a reasonable chance you’ll get some brilliant photos in the process.
That’s a successful afternoon in our book.
This one requires almost no preparation.
Give everyone a phone or camera, if they’re old enough, and create a list of things they have to photograph around the house.
Try:
Give everyone 20 or 30 minutes, then meet back up and compare your pictures.
You could award points for the funniest, cleverest or most ridiculous interpretation of each clue.
Fair warning: “someone caught completely unaware” may result in photographs you immediately demand are deleted.
Not just a board game.
A tournament.
Choose three or four games and create a scoreboard. Award points for first, second and third place, then add everything up at the end.
For maximum unnecessary competitiveness, make a trophy.
It doesn’t need to be impressive. In fact, it’s probably better if it isn’t. A wooden spoon wrapped in foil. A mug with CHAMPION taped to it. A cereal box cut into the approximate shape of a cup.
The winner gets to keep it until the next rainy day.
Just choose your games carefully if Monopoly has previously caused a family incident.
Sofa cushions. Blankets. Dining chairs. Duvets.
Basically, anything that isn’t permanently attached to the house is now building material.
Den building is one of those activities that works particularly well across different ages because younger children can get excited about crawling inside while older children can become chief engineers and take the structural integrity extremely seriously.
Once it’s finished, don’t immediately dismantle it.
Have lunch inside. Read books. Play cards. Take torches in and tell stories. Even watching a film feels considerably more exciting when you’re doing it from inside an enormous blanket fort.
You will eventually have to put the living room back together.
That’s Future You’s problem.
We’re obviously slightly biased here.
But rainy afternoons are perfect for going through the photos you already have, especially the older ones that children might never have seen.
Get out the albums, scroll through old phone folders or find the box of prints that’s been sitting in a cupboard since approximately 2009.
Show them what Mum and Dad looked like as children. Find old holiday photos. Wedding pictures. First days at school. Grandparents when they were younger.
Children tend to love seeing evidence that their parents once had questionable haircuts too.
You could each choose a favourite and explain why you picked it. You might even rediscover a photo you’d completely forgotten about.
Split into teams or let everyone create their own round.
The questions can be about anything, but making some of them about your own family makes it much more entertaining.
Try questions such as:
Mix those with normal general knowledge, music intros or picture rounds.
Just be prepared to discover that your children remember precisely nothing about the lovely family holiday you spent six months planning but can recall every detail of the hotel breakfast buffet.
This sounds considerably more complicated than it actually is.
Stop-motion animation is simply lots of individual photographs put together so that objects appear to move. You can make one using toys, LEGO, drawings, Play-Doh or whatever else you have lying around.
Move the object a tiny amount, take a photo, move it again and repeat.
There are free and paid stop-motion apps that can help put the pictures together afterwards.
The first attempt may be approximately seven seconds long and take 45 minutes to make.
That is normal.
But planning the story, building the set and creating the film can keep everyone occupied for ages, particularly older primary-school children.
Find a box or container and let everyone choose a few things that represent family life right now.
You could include:
Write the date on the box and agree when you’re allowed to open it.
A year might work for younger children. Five years makes it much more interesting if you can resist having a peek.
And yes, you will probably discover that one child’s contribution is a carefully written letter about their hopes for the future while another has put in a Pokémon card and a crisp packet.
Both are technically historical records.
Not every rainy day needs to become a carefully planned family experience.
Sometimes everyone wants pyjamas, snacks and a film. Excellent choice.
But when you’ve got a whole wet Saturday stretching ahead of you, doing one small thing together can completely change the day.
Bake something. Build something. get far too competitive over a board game. Take silly photos around the house.
Because years from now, nobody is going to remember that the weather ruined your plans.
They might remember Dad accusing an eight-year-old of cheating at Connect 4, though.
And there’s probably a photo of it somewhere.
