Mindless stuff and summer ideas?

This is the first week without school, and although Tuesday breezed by without a blink (dr's appt day) today has been much slower-paced. We took our time this morning and everyone was up, fed, bathed, and dressed by about 9:30.

All three little ones now have snotty noses and although I was debating taking them all in, they did seem markedly better after a warm bath and breakfast. So we decided against the morning visit to the ped's office but it may still be in our near future. Emma hasn't gotten any worse but has had this runny nose since coming off of antibiotics. Micah started his on Tuesday and Brianna seems to have it bad a day then not for 3 and then today she was runny again. She also got up on the wrong side of the bed today and was a grump until nap time.

Not sure about AFTER nap yet because... she's still sleeping. She had a BM during the beginning of nap time and then got cleaned up and she and I laid down in the twin. She's now barracaded in (seriously, a pretty good barracade! plus there's a side rail on the bed) and is sleeping soundly despite me having opened her door and turning the hallway light on about 30 min ago. I guess she needed her sleep.

I've spent the afternoon picking up here and there. Our porch exploded yesterday (but it was FUN!! LOL) so I picked up the babies' stuff and K is "working on" his stuff (ie: Playing). Both E and M are playing out there. Emma's discovered that the Fisher Price train sings when you press the top :) She's enjoying it!

Tonight we have FLG (church group) at our house which means I copped out of cooking snacks by buying a bag of pretzel sticks, tortilla chips, and a jar of salsa. Some 2-liters of soda to accompany it and we'll call that "snack". If I get the gumption I'll cook something but I'm not sure that will happen today. Luckily the living room is fairly kid-free and usually ready for guests. I did remove the large pile of things that were ready to go out the door and now they're hidden discreetly behind the chairs in a HUGE bin. They have gotten smaller and smaller too as people have come over and I've sent a thing or two home with each person :) :) Now there's only a few BIG things to get rid of and a lot of little things.

Now that I've purged a lot of the little things and several of the big things that were cluttering our house I'm starting to think about special activities for the summer months when there's no break-up in many of our days. We still have therapists coming in 3 hours/week but those are the only things that break up out M-W and Th-Sun we only have church on Sat night. Last year I took K's bins and put different activities in each one. He had a puzzle, an art project, flash cards, books, his Leap Pad, etc. He was allowed to pick out one bin at a time and we'd play with that thing. This worked really well for about 8 weeks and then went down the tubes. He was too comfortable with the idea and stopped putting things away as nicely and got out multiple things at once, making a huge mess.

This year we're working on a few more 'school related' skills like writing and reading. He's really good with numbers already but needs to learn the names for the higher numbers. So we'll work a little on these things with some books I've picked up. Any other ideas for summer fun that we can do INDOORS? We have plenty to do outside including a pool, playground, and water toys, but it's just TOO HOT and the sun is too bright to go outside for more than a few minutes at a time for a majority of the day. Then in the afternoon there's those predictable thunder storms! (I wish we'd had some more today because right now everything's on fire instead)