Fun in the Winter: Playing at Home

For the third and final installment of our "how we're having fun in the winter" series, I thought I'd just post about some of the fun things we do at home!  As you may recall, we are renting a furnished apartment, which has been really really great!  One of the especially neat things about it is that it was already "furnished" with some toys for Elias too!  One of the biggest hits so far has been a little three-wheeled scooter.

Elias loves tooling around on that thing, and it's pretty awesome because it doesn't make much noise either.

He actually prefers being pushed on it, but that's easier for the pushee than the pusher!

Another fun toy that was already here was the little basketball goal you can see behind Elias in the second picture.  We bought the little plush ball at Ikea, and he loves playing with it!  (The only downside is that now he knows who Spongebob is...  Ha!)

I mentioned another fun toy we just purchased in my last post - a little toy piano.  Elias has always loved playing the piano, but what's really special about this one is that it has a microphone he can sing into!  He was leery of it at first, but quickly embraced the joy of hearing his own voice amplified.  Here he is singing his own lyrics to "76 Trombones!"


And lest you think Elias is the only one having any fun, I'll point out in the third picture behind Justin you can see that we've bought an antenna for the TV that came with the apartment.  Not only is watching Turkish TV good for our language, but some of it is really entertaining too!  We've seen Turkish versions of Deal or No Deal, America's Got Talent, and Wheel of Fortune - all of which are highly entertaining!

So these are the solutions we've found so far for keeping ourselves sane while we wait for winter to finally end.  We got even MORE snow today, but we're trying to hang in there!!!