Family Game Night

What story are you telling your child? Is it a story of running from place to place "spending" time with each other? Is it a story of dad in the bedroom watching the game, mom in the living room watching HGTV and the child or children in their room "cave" watching Nickelodeon?

Or are you telling them the family story? The story of picking a TV show together and watching it together or better yet an activity or game played together.

For the past three weeks (I only have Brooklyn every other weekend so this has spanned six weeks) we have initiated family game night. Brooklyn actually starts planning it on Monday and tries to figure out what we can do so everyone will participate. The first two weeks we played Boggle so Mike would join us. Mike likes word games. This Sunday we are considering geo-caching. It's an activity that will get us out of the house. We will have to use our brains, we will need to learn our area and hopefully we will laugh together.

If your child is spending a lot of time as a recluse in their room is it because you are spending too much time on the computer or watching only what you want to watch on the TV. I fear in the future when our kids don't visit and we are wondering why, we might think to the relationship we want and realize we should have built it when they were younger.

And building relationship doesn't mean it costs money. It could be tossing a frisbee or ball in the yard. It could be sitting on the porch at dusk talking about your day sharing a glass of tea or lemonade. You could just take a walk around the park or push your child on the slide.

Spend time together it is an investment that will pay off in huge dividends when you are old!