School Holidays – Quality Time For the Whole Family

With our lifestyles being as frenetic and busy as they are these days, many parents often struggle to find the time to just sit down and spend some quality time with their children.  We live a constant juggling act between school and work, soccer practice and ballet recitals, homework, building that hat for the Easter parade, going to the dentist, paying those bills, doing the groceries, cleaning the house, catching up on the ever growing pile of washing in the laundry, trying to find time to keep our marriages in tact and the list goes on. Spending some time with the kids, unfortunately for most of us, often gets pushed to the bottom of the list.

It becomes just another “thing” we have to do in our day. And this shouldn’t be the case, nor do any of us want it that way. Quality time with our kids just becomes another victim of our faced paced, jam-packed lifestyles.

What Can Be Done?

SO, what can we do to turn this around a little? We can use the school holiday period to spend some quality time with our kids. The kids are off school for a couple of weeks, a lot of sports that run through the week are also on term break so why not take advantage of the lull in activity, put the other chores on the backburner and spend some time with your kids. Let’s face it, all the other chores will still be there waiting for you when you return to your usual chaotic pace. Enjoying time together as a family is as, if not more, important than all those other things and yet it seems to always be one of the first things to suffer because of time restraints.

Things To Do Together

What things can we do together as a family? Well the answer to that is, whatever you want! And don’t panic, spending time together doesn’t have to involve expense. Kids will be as impressed by a camp out in the backyard as they will with the real thing at a holiday park that will inevitably cost you money.

Activities to consider that won’t cost you anything:

• Going on a picnic (yes you have to buy food, but you would have to buy that anyway)
• Go to your local library, get the kids their own library card and borrow some books. The added advantage – you may start or encourage a love of reading.
• Do some research online and find some local bike paths. Then get your helmets on and get out there for some family fun and great exercise in the fresh air.
• Don’t forget the humble board game. The weather can be terrible and finances can be tight, but fun can still be had. Many of us have fond memories of family monopoly wars, that doesn’t have to be forgotten because we now have video games and giant plasma screen TV’s.

Use your imagination. Of course there are many other things you can do together, things that can cost you money or not but the important thing is to try and spend as much time as possible with our kids. Before we know they’ll have grown up and left the nest.

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Activities Parents Can Do With the Kids