During my middle school and high school years he traveled a lot with his job, so when he'd come home on the weekends, his sole desire was to gather his kiddos around him and enjoy being together. Sometimes that meant hilarious games of charades. Sometimes popcorn and a movie. Sometimes the boys won out and the movie was replaced by a football/baseball/basketball game. At any rate, I guess you could say that the idea for "family nights" originated with dear old Dad. ;-)
This is my original post explaining how I started, and what elements I include. That's changed a bit over the last couple of years. I used to try to do something "grand" each and every week. As you can imagine, that got pretty challenging... For that reason, I'd like to share this "addendum" from a more recent post...
Do we have family night every week?
Yes and no. We have “family time” blocked off every Friday night, but we only do one themed family night each month. I like to keep the ideas fresh and don’t want the kids to get bored with it. Also, one Friday night each month Chris “dates” one of the children. They rotate month to month. January was Jake, February – Sam, and March will be Emilee’s turn. We also have one Friday night that we call Pizza & Movie night, where we order in and the kids get to take turns picking the movie. So, we have something planned almost every week.
Also, feel free to browse around the blog to look for ideas. I almost always post some kind of "summary" or "report" of our Family Night events, because the grandparents (and other family) get such a kick out of reading them. To make it easer for you, I have created a labels tab called Hot Topics in the sidebar section... just look over there, and click on the Family Night Link to find most (not all, yet... I'm working on finding them, myself!) of the posts.
Have Fun!!
Have Fun!!
