Because UMass cancelled classes, the schools are closed, and you’ve been in this house for 36 hours.
1. Declare a “screen time amnesty.”
Today doesn’t count. It never happened. The iPad is a babysitter, a therapist, and a hero. We don’t talk about it.
2. Make “snow day pancakes.”
Regular pancakes, but you call them snow day pancakes. This buys you 45 minutes of goodwill and costs $2. Best ROI of your life.
3. Invent a family Olympics.
Sock sliding in the hallway. Pillow javelin. Competitive blanket fort judging. Give out medals made of bottle caps. Take it very seriously.
4. Send the kids outside exactly once.
Bundle them up for 25 minutes. They’ll be back in 8. But those 8 minutes? Sacred.
5. Start a “project.”
Doesn’t matter what it is. A puzzle. A birdhouse. Reorganizing a drawer. The project will never be finished. That’s not the point. The point is structured chaos with a name.
6. Watch a movie you actually want to watch.
Negotiate. You sat through Paw Patrol: The Movie three times. Today you’re watching something with subtitles or at least one explosion that isn’t animated.
7. Cook something ridiculous.
Homemade bread. Dumplings from scratch. Soup that takes four hours. Snow days are the only days you have an excuse to actually use that Dutch oven collecting dust in the cabinet.
8. Accept that the house will be destroyed.
This is not a mess. This is a memory. Tell yourself this every 20 minutes until you believe it.
9. Declare quiet hour.
You’re allowed. It’s in the Geneva Convention. Everyone retreats to a corner, no questions, no snacks, no “Mom/Dad?” for sixty consecutive minutes. Put it in writing.
10. Go to bed 30 minutes early.
You survived. The snow is still coming down. School might be cancelled again tomorrow. Don’t think about that yet. You’re a hero. Rest.
11. Establish a currency system.
Chores for screen time. Screen time for snacks. Snacks for peace and quiet. By 2pm you have a fully functioning shadow economy in your living room. Someone will try to counterfeit. You know who.
12. Reorganize something no one asked you to reorganize.
The spice cabinet. The junk drawer. Your child’s bookshelf by color. You will feel like a god. No one will notice. It will be undone by Thursday.
13. Start a family group chat just for people in the same house.
Send memes to each other from separate rooms. React with emojis. Someone will eventually reply “who is this.”
14. Teach your kid something useless but impressive.
How to shuffle cards like a Vegas dealer. How to whistle with two fingers. How to say “I would like a glass of water” in four languages. None of this will help them in life. All of it will come up at a dinner party in 2041.
15. Declare yourself a “local meteorologist.”
Look out the window every 20 minutes. Give updates no one requested. Use words like “accumulation” and “wind advisory.” Point at nothing dramatically. Your family will hate this. Do it anyway.
16. Attempt one genuinely ambitious thing.
Homemade pasta. A 1,000-piece puzzle. Learning a song on an instrument that’s been in the corner since 2019. You will not finish. You will feel oddly fulfilled. The pasta will be lumpy. Eat it anyway.
17. Have a snack that is not a meal and not quite a snack.
Cheese and crackers at 3pm. Leftover soup at 10am. A single piece of chocolate at 8am “for morale.” Snow days exist outside the normal food rules. This is known.
18. Pick a fight with the weather app.
It said 4-6 inches. It is clearly 11 inches. You want answers. You want accountability. You screenshot the original forecast. You are building a case. Against a weather app. On a snow day. This is fine.
19. Rediscover something.
A board game in the closet. A playlist from 2009. A book you bought with full intentions. Snow days have a strange magic for this — the enforced stillness surfaces things. Let it.
20. Make one ridiculous promise to yourself.
Next snow day I’ll be prepared. Candles. Good coffee. A stack of books. A plan. You won’t be. But the promise feels good. Make it anyway.
21. Check Amherst Now obsessively.
Someone posted that Stop & Shop still has bread. Someone else says they don’t. A third person is very upset about the sidewalk plowing on North Pleasant Street. You don’t know any of these people but you are deeply invested. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.
My 7 year old daughter is the family meteorologist. She comments on everything and makes her own predictions. So far she’s more accurate than the weather app. So we just listen to her.
Number 8 also 😂.
The house is always destroyed by the end of the day, snow day or not.