Excellent ways to keep the kids occupied when you have a rotten head cold and feel like someone has pumped swamp water into your sinuses

1. Have them count the money in their piggy banks. This is especially effective if they don't know a lot about how much coins are worth, since it will take them a really really long time and involve many restarts.

Pitfall 1: The money snatchers are likely to start trying to sneak coins from each other's piles, leading to shouting squabbles, crying, and the necessity for extremely loud interventions on your part and threats to reclaim all the money as your own.

Pitfall 2: Because they need help remembering the value of all the coins, and they are more than a little sketchy on the whole "four quarters make a dollar; so do ten dimes, or twenty nickles or 100 pennies," you will have to help them calculate the dollar value of the giant pile of dirty coins that is probably covered with hideous germs that will certainly compound your horrendous head cold and turn it into something even worse.

Bonus 1: The spitting fights might produce enough liquid to wash all those coins.

Bonus 2: Someone might learn how to count by tens.

2. Have them read each other stories while you lie in bed next to them with your eyes half closed. This works less well if neither of them can actually read, but between the books they've memorized and the ones that they will make up as they go along, it can be effective.

Pitfall 1: You will have to listen to a lot of stories punctuated with references to the planet Cybertron.

Pitfall 2: ...or poop.

Bonus 1: The alligator tears and incessant wailing over whose coins are whose has stopped.

3. Create a craft project table with markers, crayons, paper, scissors, glue sticks, and fuzzy little pom poms that can be bunny tails.

Pitfall 1: You will have to clean up all the slivers of paper from under the table in half an hour.

Pitfall 2: Someone may ask you for help drawing something complex, precise, and detailed that you do not have a clear mental picture of (such as the planet Cybertron), and that someone may or may not have a melt down when your drawing is not photo-realistic.

Bonus 1: The talk about poop will have stopped.

4. Turn on the evil box in the corner on which magic pictures will dance in front of your children's eyes, mesmerizing them completely, so that they are still, quiet, and content.

Pitfall 1: [crickets] Really, I have to come up with a pitfall to this plan for blissful silence?

Pitfall 2:The whole point of the penny counting, creative storytime, and desperation glue sticks is that your Son is banned from TV until tomorrow for bad behavior over the weekend. So you can't in good conscience turn on the evil box, even though all you really want is for someone to offer you a head transplant, which you would gladly accept without anaesthetic because your current head is ringing so badly. Failing the head transplant, content children would be a nice consolation prize, but apparently you can't have those either.

Bonus: At least you can feel virtuous that you made good on your threat that if the fighting didn't stop, all those coins would be yours. Plus, you must be about $50 richer.

Give or take 218 nickels.