Things To Do For Two

• Cost - under $10, depending on what you eat and your entertainment.

Nothing can really beat the true picnic experience, sitting out on the grass under the warm sunshine, but when it looks like monsoon season outside, an indoor picnic will do just fine. All that’s needed is a room big enough to spread a blanket out on, a blanket and pillows, your favorite picnic food,  a basket (cheaply obtained from the dollar store) and some form of entertainment (board game, movie, music, etc.).

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SHE SAID:

Since I couldn’t have a traditional picnic, I wanted to laugh in the face of all things wet and cloudy and kick this rainy day’s butt. I wanted to have the best indoor picnic EVER! So, I made my own sun and fluffy, non-rain filled clouds and hung them with fish line and tape above the blanket and pillows Brad set up on our living room floor. I bought a cute little basket from Dollarama that served as our picnic basket and filled it with sandwiches, bananas, and chocolate bars for dessert (also from Dollarama). I also picked up some President’s Choice Italian Soda I recently became obsessed with (the Blood Orange flavour is the best!).

I highly recommend doing something at your picnic, otherwise you’ll just be staring at the same four walls you’ve been staring at for the last 40 rain-filled days. We decided to play Scrabble, but it might also be fun to watch such a fitting old movie as Singing in the Rain. I can beat Brad any day at Word Twist, but Scrabble is another story, most likely because it involves strategy to win.

For those of you whose best Scrabble move has been a three-letter noun, I recommend a strategy I like to use from time to time called the “dignity keeper.” You look in the dictionary to “check” for a word, meanwhile scouring the pages for an actual word to save yourself from falling behind by fifty points. Yes, it’s slightly deceitful, but survival isn’t always pretty.

For the first few rounds I was hanging on and actually managed to get a couple of points ahead of Brad, until I accidentally set him up for a triple word score, and the rest is history.

HE SAID:

Sometimes you have to bite the bullet and do something you’re not convinced will be the most fun thing ever. This was one of those things. I can handle the idea of a regular outdoor picnic, but I wasn’t sure how this indoor picnic idea was going to turn out. I had visions of us sitting in the middle of an empty room, shoving tuna sandwiches into our mouthes in silence as we secretly plotted each others demise. Luckily it didn’t turn out quite that bad.

I enjoyed the fact that it was a simple way to do something new. It didn’t require a lot of preparation in order to have fun. So once the sandwiches were made, we just threw everything into a basket, laid a blanket on the living room floor, pulled out Scrabble from the closet, and we were off to the races.

On a side note, if you plan on making a meal even the teensiest bit more complicated than it has to be, make sure you aren’t so hungry during the preparation that you’re cranky. Lesson learned.

Playing Scrabble was the highlight of the indoor picnic for me. It’s one of my favorite board games, especially when I win…by a lot. We have the official Scrabble dictionary so that we can avoid any arguments over which words are allowed and which ones aren’t.

It may seem like a silly idea, but in the end it turned out to be a memorable experience and I’d say it’s definitely worth trying if you’ve never done it before.

Here are a few simple tips if you’d like to pull off a successful indoor picnic:

1. Don’t wait until you are hungry to start getting things together for you picnic

2. Have a board game, movie, or some other fun thing to do while you eat

3. Don’t worry about everything being perfect, just have fun and enjoy the process

4. If you have a room with a carpeted floor, for the love of all things good and holy, use it!