As America begins to open up, more and more options for going out are, too. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still have fun together as a family at home, especially as the kids’ summer vacation really starts.
Game It. Board games, many which have been crowd-funded, have enjoyed a wonderful resurgence of late (you may have tried to buy one recently online, only to be informed that it would take weeks to arrive). The allure is more than desperation on the part of people shut into their homes. Games are interactive, lend themselves to fun conversations and can teach valuable reasoning and problem-solving skills. In addition, parents might even be able to beat their kids at a game, for once.
Bonfires. It’s almost universal—laughing, toasting marshmallows and maybe even singing along to a guitar around a fire makes joy for everyone. It’s easy, it’s inexpensive and you only have to travel to your backyard to make it happen.
Read Aloud. Oh, you want to blow your kids’ minds? Read a great book—Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, maybe a spy novel—aloud to them. Sounds geeky, right? It is, a little; but it’s also a novel way to relive scintillating stories together in a different medium from movies. And, it might just get those kiddos to read more. And that’s never a bad thing.
So go ahead, interact. Play. Read. In doing that, you’ll spend that time together doing something truly memorable.