Our Week Night Family Adventures

At the end of 2020, when we were working on our goals and plans for this year, one of the things Bart suggested was doing a weekly family outing on a week night.

We did a whopping total of one between January and April.

And then, in May, Bart suggested that instead of feeling pressure to reinvent the wheel every week and doing something new and exciting, we just pick a couple of things and repeat them.

Brilliant!

We decided that for the time being, we’d do bowling and golfing (our city rec center passes make golfing very cheap or free) as our go-tos and then add other things if they occurred to us, but no pressure to be figuring out something new every week.

We picked a day of the week where we had no obligations and decided we’d aim for 4:30 as our departure time and plan to be back around 6:00 in time for dinner and regular bedtime.

It’s been SO GREAT.

The other great thing is that it’s a really inexpensive time to do most things – bowling, for example, is $1 a game at this time of day and it’s very uncrowded.

And, it’s fun to be getting a little better at some of these things because we’re practicing them more consistently than once every six months.

A few things that make it work for us:

  • The same time every week. It’s on the calendar and we all can plan for it.
  • Making a crockpot dinner. I decided that every week, I’d do a crockpot meal for this night so that we could come home and eat within about 10 minutes. It makes it MUCH less stressful to me because I’m not scrambling for dinner when we get back.
  • I leave my phone at home. Bart has his, so there is no reason to bring mine along. It’s so nice to just be fully present and not distracted.
  • Doing it every week means there isn’t a feeling of scarcity about it. Because we’re doing it every week, no one is freaking out when it’s time to be done and go home – they know we’ll be out again next week, doing something fun!

Any questions about how these mid-week family adventures work for us? I’m happy to answer!

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6 Comments

  1. This sounds so fun!! I’m guessing it’s too cold to golf year around though. What cold weather activity do you think you’d sub out golf for?

    1. Bowling or ice skating or roller skating are great ones during winter. We also will have ski passes this winter, so I’m guessing we’ll do that fairly often this winter. We also have rec center passes so we can do indoor swimming year round.

  2. This is so smart! I also usually feel pressured to do something “new and exciting” but it’s just as much fun to have a tradition or your family “thing” and get good at it.

    I like the idea of doing it early and being home for supper. Eating out with kids is costly and usually doesn’t feel worth the splurge to me. Do you think you’ll keep this up during the school year or will after-school activities interfere?

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