This is a guest post
As a single mother that works a full time 40 hour a week job trying to find the balance between the job that brings the money into our household, time with my two daughters and the normal chores and tasks that need doing on a daily basis is not easy at all. However, all this means is that when the time to spend family time together comes around we all value and make the most of each and every second spent in each other’s company. The following activities are our favourite things to do together on a regular basis.
- See the Animals
My six and seven year olds are mad about animals and they’ve convinced me to bring a cat, a dog, a hamster and several fish into our small house. However, they adore each and every one of these animals and they’re eager to help clean up and look after the animals despite the fact that they hate cleaning up after themselves! With this in mind we have a couple of different animal related activities available to partake in depending on how tight time is. If it’s wet and horrible or we have other plans we often take a short walk to our local park with a loaf of bread to feed the ducks. This is one of the best things we could do on the price/happiness as a family. On days we have longer to spend together we travel the short distance to our local zoo and make a day of it and despite being the more expensive of the two our yearly pass and a family picnic while in the zoo grounds makes several visits a year both affordable and great fun for myself and my children.
- Educational Games
With me working a full time position during the week that starts shortly after dropping them to school and then having relatives pick them up and help with homework and feed them until I finish work, I do not the opportunity to be as involved in the after school aspect of their education as I would prefer. To help combat this we play some educational games along with the normal singing, dancing and running around like lunatics that happens in and around the house. Games like Junior Scrabble help them with their vocabulary and English learning skills, while to help with their mathematics we play bingo games. They are smart children that love to learn normally and they love it even more so when it happens in family game time.
- Movie Time
Sometimes after a long week at work for myself and a draining week at school for my daughters instead of going out or doing anything around the house (including cleaning!) we love nothing more than stuffing our faces with popcorn and having a movie marathon in the house. We have countless amounts of DVDs as well as a subscription to Netflix plus several movie channels, so we always have something different to watch. However it rarely works that way as the children have their favourite movies and we can see the same films two or three weeks in a row. The current favourite of Frozen has been seen at least ten times in recent months! I may be biased, but popcorn, movies and being snuggled up as a family on the couch does not get any better.
There are many other family activities that we engage in that allow us to shut out the world and for it to be just us alone. Things like camping in the back garden and roasting marshmallows! We’ve had whole weekend’s and days off having play dates that allow the youngsters to run around for hours on end while having coffee with the other parents. Family activities do not have to cost the world and there is so much that can be done as a family the possibilities are limitless. When I do get to grab some time alone though I do love relaxing playing on bingo games site Butlers Bingo. It has a great social element to it with chat rooms and even some games which are free to play in!