(1) First, and foremost, you must not leave the house. You may go into your yard, but you cannot leave the neighborhood. Getting into a car is RIGHT OUT. The girls and I tested our “ability to be shut-ins” acumen over break. We left the house 8x in 20 days. We gathered LOTS of data. As a Momma who commutes her kids to school, this may have been my life’s favorite experiment.

(2) You must not get dressed. I know what you’re thinking: but these girls are dressed, out in the snow. Nope. Under those snowsuits are layers upon layers of pjs. How many days did they wear them? I have no idea. Asking about clothing cleanliness invalidates the shut-in questionnaires, and is an unforgivable parenting sin during a Holiday Break. Everyone knows this.

(3) As you cannot get in a car, you cannot go out to eat.  Have plenty of food on hand…really, really yummy food.  Let me give you an example of a successful shopping list for a shut-in scenario: a cotton candy maker, an ice cream maker (winning!), cream soda, pizza crusts (et al.), popcorn, POTATOES, chips, yogurt, Kefir and fruit, ingredients for countless pots of soup, a variety of cheeses, bagels, corn dogs…shall I go on? Will you be able to snap your jeans when this experience is over? NO. Wear sweats throughout the experiment. Duh.

(4) Eat the food. When you get heartburn, stop. When it goes away, start again. Insert as many beers and glasses of wine as necessary. I can write you a prescription: “Alcohol prn, for the duration of your shut-in-edness, and/or until the kids go back to school. Taper off slowly.”

(5) This step is KEY to your success: take sturdy sheets and a non-stretching rope, and using your kitchen table, create kid hammocks underneath. Your table top will be out of commission due to said ropes, but your kids will literally swing for days. Curled up with books and toys and the occasional iPad…they will actually fall asleep in the middle of the family commotion. Do NOT, I repeat, DO NOT put these in the dining room. Kids are like cats: they want to be hidden in the middle of the action. At least 1 foot clearance is needed to swing, and I direct all engineering questions to Greg, who came up with this brilliant idea. When they start swinging higher than the table, trying to bang into each other, it’s time to disassemble. Kids are rarely subtle at this step in the hammock experiment. There will be screaming. There might be blood. But major fun will be had, and countless hours of quiet time will be given unto you.

(6) For your own entertainment, spend a full week taking down Christmas. Why not? What else are you going to do? Actual work? NO…forward progress is not allowed. Only maintenance tasks can be completed: laundry, dishes, cooking, and the putting away of Christmas. No other projects may be started or completed. This is not an experiment in productivity…quite the opposite really. My Mother-In-Law told me to cut up paper towel rolls to hold my wrapping paper on place.  Works beautifully, can’t believe I’ve spent years with unwrapped paper, will never go back. See? You learn all kinds of things when you aren’t busy “going places” or “seeing people”…or…”brushing your hair”…

(7) If the kids start to fight, lift up all rugs and furniture, and turn your first floor into a skating rink.  What if your kids don’t know how to skate? Didn’t stop mine! I loved hearing my Dad lecture me about the importance of wrist guards and knee pads, etc. Had I considered putting a helmet on them? This coming from the man who let me take the snowmobile out in the dark across the fields to see if I could get the coyotes to chase me in the moonlight. I was 10. But it’s cool…I had my older cousin with me. He was 13. We survived. Without wrist guards.

(8) If you turn your back on said skaters, they may decide to open up a Science Lab in your kitchen.  You may find them holding sharp objects, stabbing at ice inside glass containers, while skating around the kitchen. But not to worry, they had on their swim goggles for safety. Safety first, that’s my girls! I did make them choose between skating and science, and they chose science, no surprise. I mean after all, we were in the midst of an intensive research project (do I smell Science Fair ribbons in our future?!). With a few kits to choose from, they wanted to explode things. BORING.  Pretty sure there was nothing left to blow up after 20 days inside the house!

(9) Convince them to do a light experiment instead.  They will humor you for a few minutes, but then they will tell you it’s beneath them. LIGHT. It has SO been done before Momma. WHATEVER. Go explode things. Explode each other. We’ve BEEN IN THIS HOUSE FOREVER! We had reached a scientific impasse. It happens.

(10) Be sure to stay up very late. Be sure to sleep in very late. Be sure to eat pancakes for lunch. Be sure to watch so many movies, you’re speaking in nothing but movie quotes (if this hasn’t happened by Day #12, you haven’t watched enough movies…watch “The Goonies” STAT!). Be sure to play so many games that you change the rules on your games to suit your tastes. Games play better with candy in your mouth. I crunched that data so many times, but it always came out the same. Delicious.

And when it’s all said and done, and you shower the sticky sucker marks off your kids cheeks (when did they last eat suckers? yesterday? hard to say?), and you dry their hair, and dress them for school…..and you OPEN THE GARAGE DOOR…and GO OUT INTO PUBLIC…you will have one thought and one thought only:

I wish we could do that all over again.