FFN takes the night off

This week our family fun night was preempted with a friend visit. We let the kids enjoy the time over the weekend playing with their friend. We still had some quality time together, but mostly over food. YMMMM pancakes, sausage and eggs. Take a look at the pics page for some pics of last weeks fun with Dicecapades.

Back to Family Fun Knights

Well we started again. My wife and I took the kids to Toys R Us and spent a little time looking over the isles of games to see what new wonders we could find. After several hours of searching (ok it was only about 20 min), we decided to give Dicecapades! by Haywire Group a try. Did I mention the game has over 100 dice? The game is suggested for players over the age of 12, but our 7 and 10yr old had lots of fun playing. We did need to help the 7yr old with the tougher trivia questions although he did get a few everyone else was stumped on. The game has trivia questions, skills, drawing, spelling and memorization challenges. The only real problem we ran into is the time. The box said 30min to play a game. We ran over an hour easy. Some of the questions are worded a little ambiguously, but we just made a few house rulings to clear things up. It was nice to get everyone together again and spend some quality time with the t.v. and video games turned off. I'll have some pictures to post in a couple of days. Oh and did I mention it came with over 100 dice?!?

The planning stage begins

It has been about six months since we had our last family fun night. Baseball practice started, snack bar duties and all the other things that so easily seem to get in the way, got in the way of family fun night.

Time to follow my own list of how to get started. I sat down with my wife and we went over our families' calendar commitments. Baseball is over, but football has already begun. So when can we all get together?!? After much deliberation and deep thought (OK it wasn't really that hard), we decided on Friday/Saturday Nights. (another tip for the list - be flexible and have a couple of days each week if possible open for FFN. It makes it a lot easier to plan and keeps you from skipping weeks, which leads to months, which leads to...... you get the picture)

Now it is time to plan what we will do for FFN. Any suggestions?

Welcome to the first installment of Family Fun Knight!!!
 

"Honey! Who's night is it to cook dinner?" 

   "I did it the last three nights. It's your turn."

 "Are you sure?"

  "YES!"

 "Alright. Who is going to be home to eat? The boys have practice tonight."

  "I'm going to the gym at 7:30, so we better eat early."
 "OK, sounds like take out tonight."

Sound familiar? AS our children grow and become more involved with sports, friends and the riggers of homework, it is harder and harder to find time to come together as a family. A couple of years ago I had the idea that our family needed to have a night dedicated to just being together and having fun. No pressures about who is going to cook, what is on t.v., or any of the other million excuses that were getting in our way of sharing quality time together.

This blog is for you and me and all the other families out there that may need a reminder from time to time, that family time is important. That just being together figuring out a puzzle or building a new Lego set while talking about the day's events means something.

Let's use this page together. Send in ideas for Family Fun Knight Events and stories from your own family gatherings. I will post what our family is doing.