Family Fun Night

With three young children it can be very difficult to give each one the opportunity to make decisions and feel like their ideas are heard and valued. We also feel that often after meals one of us is holed up in the kitchen cleaning up (usually me), while Dave is corralling the kids in the living room playing his game idea of "Lay-Down Tickle Monster". He explains that is a genius idea because he gets to lay down (tired from a day of running around working) and gets to grab at and tickle the kids while they run around him. While that is all fun, we knew that there were countless board games getting dusty and no time to just be home as a family. With that in mind, we came up with our Family Fun Night idea.

Here's how Family Fun Night works! We get out our family calendar at the beginning of each month. Each member of the family is assigned an evening that month to be the sole decision maker of (sorry, Max, being able to say words besides "Vrooom and Da!" are mandatory). That evening, the selected person is in charge of planning the dinner and dessert menu and the family activity. We have had water balloon fights, roasted smores over our fire pit, camped in our backyard and rediscovered that board and card games are all teachable moments within themselves.

A couple of simple rules we needed to enforce after requests of Joe's Crab Shack and Adventureland came up right away were 1) The menu needed to be stated before mom's weekly trek to the grocery store and 2) The activity needed to be Free. I love the creativity they have shown so far!

We are having a lot of fun, its inexpensive and something we actually look forward to!