The Tommerdahls: October Family Fun Nights

As I mentioned last month in this blog post, we are trying something new this year, doing family fun nights each Friday to make family time a priority. During these nights, my goal is to try to get a picture of all 5 of us, just for fun! For the month of October, there were 5 Fridays, so our themes were:

Star Gazing and S'mores Night
Play Dough Night
Summer Cooks
Book Night
Balloon Night

Star Gazing and S'mores Night

On Stargazing and S'mores Night, we had S'mores at home, got all ready for bed and in our jammies, and then headed about 20 minutes south to Whitetail Woods Regional Park (I called around and here is a great spot for stargazing as it is farther from suburb/city lights).

We packed up lots of blankets, including the kids favorite blankies, flashlights, and Summer requested to bring along her journal ;).

We walked a little ways down by the lake.

We found a good spot and waited for the last light of sun to disappear over the horizon.

This night has been one of my favorite family nights so far! I loved the cuddles as we all snuggled together on the blankets. I wasn't sure how Larkyn would do but she LITERALLY jabbered nonstop about all that she could see! It was so funny! Paul tried to take a video, but it was so dark that all you can do is hear a bit of the sound track...click here. Summer wanted to document everything in her journal :). Colton cuddled up with Daddy :). Daddy told us all what starts/planets we were seeing using an App on his phone. It was SO fun!

Play Dough Night

The kids were pretty excited about this night! Originally I had just thought we would play play dough, but Colton and I read this library book...

with a fun dough recipe in the back that we decided to try...

It turned out delicious, and was also a GREAT dough for molding into things as it was not too sticky.

Colton and I did the traditional Challah braid

Daddy and Summer got a little creative and made a flower

It is a DELICOUS bread, kinda sweet, and oh so yummy! Of course, those of you who know me well know how much I love bread!!

The rest of our evening was spent with play-dough while the real dough was baking.

Daddy's play dough "taco"

Summer's extra long "finger"

Colton's.. um .. flattened worms???? ;)

Larkyn's first time experiencing playdough! Click here for a little video :).

Summer Cooks (a.k.a Rainbow Night)

"Summer cooks" was a chance for Summer to serve the family. We celebrated this night in conjunction with Summer's 2nd spiritual birthday (click here for more). Summer chose to make all rainbow themed foods! She did everything from surf pinterest for recipes, gather the ingredients from the grocery store, and cook/bake/chop as needed :).

Rainbow spaghetti

Rainbow spaghetti with Parmasian crisp clouds

Rainbow fruit salad

Rainbow sprinkle cookies

Book Night

The fourth family fun night, book night, I unfortunately have no pictures for!! We decided to make a road trip that weekend to Fergus Falls so Paul could go hunting with his dad and brother! I WILL have a blog post on that soon (whenever I get caught up!) but there wasn't a great way to take a picture of all 5 of us in the car as Larkyn is still in a rear facing carseat. Anyway, we DID have fun reading lots of library books and even listening to some audio books from the library on CD in the car.

Balloon Night

For balloon night, we simply blew up about 20 balloons! So easy and cheap but so fun!

The kids had a blast playing with them before Paul got home from work...and also the next day on Saturday!

We played three games together after dinner (Boys vs. Girls):

Balloon Snowball Fight Objective: get all balloons on OTHER teams side. Click here for video.
Balloon Volleyball: Coffee table net. One balloon in the air. (Sorry, I forgot to take a video!)
Balloon Relay Race: Jumping with balloon between legs from one side of the room to the other (video) and passing it off to partner and batting balloon with hand and passing it off to partner (video).

Pahl's Market

We had one Saturday family outing that I will also include on this post. We went to Pahl's Market and had a blast in their hay bale maze, corn pit, and picking out pumpkins!