Parents, if you?re like me, you?re always on the lookout for toys and games that let your kids expend some physical energy indoors. Like most kids, my two young boys?ages three and eight?need a significant amount of exercise every day, otherwise they start climbing the walls (and the play fighting gets totally out of control).
A kid-sized trampoline, a ride-on car and a small indoor slide are great toys for burning energy when stuck inside, as are these 20 fun indoor games. But over the winter, I started thinking I needed something fresh to keep my kids busy, and stumbled on the Gorilla Gym.

Although it isn?t a brand new product, and there are apparently infomercials for it running all the time, I somehow hadn?t heard of the Gorilla Gym till a bunch of the women in my Facebook mom group started talking about it. So I Googled and whoa?it did look pretty awesome. It’s nothing overly complicated?essentially, it’s a metal pull-up bar that you install in a doorway, to which you connect a variety of different attachments: a swing, a knotted rope, a rope ladder, rings and a trapeze. In other words, it’s the local playground, on steroids, in your house. Obviously, I had high hopes for this thing!
Photo: Kim Shiffman
It arrived in a surprisingly small and fairly light box, and the installation of the main unit in a doorway wasn?t overly difficult (reports my husband). If neither you nor your partner is great at these things, YouTube videos s...