Happy New Year! 2018 was a busy year and the holiday season is always a little crazy for everyone. Did you and your family get to make your own Frosty the Snowman?
Now that we’re heading into the new calendar year, Spring and warm weather will be around the corner before you know it! Grab the kids and your last few chances to get your cold-weather and snowy fun on!
Going to play in the snow is a really fun, kid-friendly way to ring in the new year with your family and enjoy the winter weather while it’s still here. Make a fort, throw some snowballs, build a snowman, make a snow angel, go sledding, and you can even go tubing down specially-made lanes in the snow!
Ski resorts almost always offer kids’ lessons, which is a great way to get them comfortable and interacting with the snow and snow sports. These are a few resorts around the Chicago area where you can ski with your kids.
If you or your little ones aren’t quite ready to strap wooden planks to your feet, but still want to go sliding down the snow, perhaps sitting in a rubber tube will sound more up your alley. Here are a few places you can go to find that cold white stuff to play around in and that offer tubing as well:
Blackwell Forest Preserve/Mt. Hoy – 45 minutes from Chicago in Warrenville
If there is at least 3 inches of snow on the ground, you can grab your tube from the base of the hill and walk it up the old-fashioned way. Bring your own thermos of hot cocoa or cider and warm up by the bonfire that is often burning.
Snowstar Winter Sports Park – 3 hours away in Andalusia
If you want a fun little weekend jaunt, you can head out to Snowstar Winter Sports Park and let the kids try their tubing skills there. The tubing hill has six lanes, a magic carpet, and a nearly 70-foot vertical to take the kids squealing down.
Sunburst Winter Sports Park – 2¼ hours away in Kewaskum, Wisconsin
Sunburst Winter Sports Park, with a mind-boggling 45 lanes, proclaims itself the world’s largest tube park. The lanes run for a quarter mile, and have almost 100 feet of vertical drop.
If that all sounds like too much work, but you get the chance this winter season to be somewhere it’s snowing, be sure to grab your little one and a couple of mugs of hot cocoa (with marshmallows of course!) and take the time to sit and watch it snow together – bonus points if you have a fire to sit next to while you do it!
Taking the time to do this with your child instills a number of valuable lessons – to slow down and enjoy what is going on around you, to understand that these are moments to be treasured and savored with loved ones, and that things like cold and harsh weather can also be beautiful!
Whatever you do, enjoy that winter weather while it’s here, and have a very Happy New Year!