Family Night at the Ellis household

I decided this Fall to start having a once a week family night.   Here are my self-imposed rules for family night:

1.  I make something fun to eat.
2.   We eat somewhere different (not at our dining room table).
3.  We do an activity together.
4.  We don't check e-mails, answer the phone, and/or do our personal things (this one I haven't totally mastered YET).  

I don't know what inspired me to try this out, perhaps it is all the researched-based e-mails I get on parenting that speak to the family meal as a really good thing. 

Or perhaps I am remembering this girl named Abby who I met when I was a teenager on an Outward Bound trip.  Her family was Jewish and celebrated Shabbat, from Friday night to sundown on Saturday.  The family stayed home playing games or hanging out having fun with each other. Friends could come over and join, but they were not allowed to go out.  I couldn't believe that poor Abby had to stay home on Friday night, it sounded awful to me.  I was surprised that she actually seemed to like what to me sounded like a terrible restriction on her social life.  

Now that I'm a mom though, I think Abby's family was onto something.    It's easy to get busy and reserving a time to do something together seems sacred.  Our family spends a lot of time together, but this is a way to mark it as something different (a ritual of sorts) and also to make sure that it happens.

We have had three family nights so far and my three year old is over the moon about them.    Here's what we've done:

Night one:  We ate Vietnamese spring rolls in our dining room and played Chutes and Ladders.
Night two: We ate udon noodle soup while watching Tangled.

Night three:  We ate hummus burgers and Moroccan carrots on our back stairs.  I covered the table in butcher paper and we brought out a whole bunch of paints, stickers, glue etc. and made a big mural.

These nights are pretty simple.  Mira goes to bed at 7:30, so dinner/activity takes about an hour and half or less. 

Now I know that some of my readers will have a sixth grader or above who may be, um, resistant to family night.  There are also sports schedules that tend to get in the way of family dinners.   Maybe you could start small--once a month.   Or maybe go for just the game, or just the dinner.  

But many of my readers have children in the younger grades (K-5th) and my hunch is that most of those kids would jump at a family night.    I don't know how it's going to work out for us, but I'm hoping that it becomes an established part of her growing up.  When Mira hits the pre-teen/teenage years,  it could become a peaceful anchor for her in this busy, chaotic world.   One can only hope!