Family Fun Fridays - September

Family Fun Fridays

This school year, we decided to try something new to be intentional about weekly family time.  It seems that when we don't schedule family time, our calendar books up with other commitments and/or house projects and weeks/weekends will go by without us spending intentional time with the 5 of us.  Especially with the start of school and earlier regular bedtimes, we decided to commit Friday nights to fun with the 5 of us, and allow a bit later bedtime.  Putting "Family Fun Friday" on each Friday night of our calendar through the end of the school year was an intentional way to make us think twice before scheduling something else, because "something" was already on the calendar.  If something comes up for a Friday, before committing, our goal is to make sure we can move our commitment of "Family Fun Friday" to another day of that week before saying yes to the other commitment.  Because I know life gets busy, and I would struggle to follow through on this goal unless it was preplanned out, I made a schedule of our Family Fun Friday's throughout the rest of the school year.  I "penciled" in our schedule, so that if we thought of another fun idea or the weather was good/bad for being outdoors, we could easily change it.  I hung our calendar on the fridge, and it is very easy for me to glance at it before my weekly grocery trip and gather any items we might need.  So far we have had a lot of fun, and I am loving our Family Fun Fridays!  My goal is to get some sort of picture of the 5 of us each Friday - not necessarily an award winning picture - a selfie will do - but nevertheless, a picture that contains all 5 of our faces :).  I think at the end of the school year it would be fun to do a post with all of the family pictures together for a fun chronology of our year :).  I will share pictures from our September Family Fun Fridays here.

Crazy Noodle / Ice Cream Sundae Night - September 11th

Family Pic!

Crazy Noodle Night - Mix noodles from several different boxes together

Icecream Sundae stuff (plus brownies - not pictured!)

Summer

Colton

Larkyn

Daddy

Lego Night - September 17th*

*We did Lego Night on the Thursday of the week instead of Friday because Daddy had his Men's Retreat all weekend :)

Silly Family Pic :)

Found these lego brownies on Pinterest...

Found this Lego Pizza on Pinterest...

Kids mixing up food coloring to frost our lego brownies...

And finding the correct color M&Ms to add the lego "dots"

Colton spreading the sauce for our Lego pizza

Summer adding the pepperoni to our lego pizza

Our meal - Lego pizza, Lego carrots (atop cream cheese spread crackers), and Lego Brownies.  The kids had SO MUCH FUN  making everything and loved telling Daddy that they made dinner when he got home :)

After dinner, it was LEGO creation time

Larkyn with the Duplos

Final Creations

Family Mural Night - September 25th

Selfie Family Pic

For dinner, we did appetizers - mozzerella sticks, tator tots, BBQ links, veggies and clementines - with peach slush to drink :)

The kids thought it was SOOOOO fun to push the table out of the way and carry the chairs into the living room so we could eat on the floor!  That way, we could be tracing people for our family mural while we were eating.

We traced everyone on a big roll of brown craft paper.

This little model says - take a picture of me!

Getting to work with all our art supplies

Larkyn spent a few minutes attempting to color, but had more fun putting the crayons in the shoes that held her paper flat :)

Our "people" are getting close to done!

Family Mural almost complete!

We hung the pictures on the wall in the basement...

...to make a large family mural.

Mural is complete!

Coming Up:

Here is the list of Family Fun Fridays scheduled for the year.  All are subject to change if we think of different or more fun ideas!  If you are reading this blog and have a fun idea, feel free to leave it in the comment section below!

I'll end this post with a quick snapshot family picture we took tonight of us in T-shirts sent by one of Paul's relative's from Sweden.  She has been fun to connect with on Facebook, and this June she sent us a traditional Swedish outfit that she herself wore when she was little.  It was a big small for Summer, but we put it on her for fun!

Summer in the clothes sent to us by Paul's Swedish relative, Eva.

Eva sent us a box of goodies from Sweden this week, including family genealogies, stuff for the kids, and these t-shirts from Sweden.

In Swedish T-shirts from Eva

The requested "silly pic" :)