Family Fun Night

A couple of years ago Otto and I sat down for a chat. We really want our children to learn how much fun being a member of a family can be, so we decided to try something out for a year. We decided to have a "Family Fun Night". This family fun night would NOT replace our Monday Family Home Evenings, but it would be a special time where our family would set aside time to do something together. Family Fun night takes place on the weekend and sometimes it is a whole evening, sometimes it is just a few hours, sometimes it involves the whole day or even the whole weekend. We have done everything from getting ice cream cones to ice skating. Every week it is different and every week we have had so much fun that we have just kept on having Family Fun Nights even though our year has long since passed.
The kids really love Family Fun Night because we all make an effort to make sure that it IS fun. Sometimes we surprise the kids, and sometimes we let the kids come up with the ideas as to what we should do. Well, today was Family Fun night. It actually started at 1:30 this afternoon when we went over to one of Otto's best friends from High School's house. They were having a dessert party and so I brought some pumpkin brownies and we all had a blast! It was nice to see Frank and Andrea and their son Callum again. Callum has autism and he was born on the same day as Anne. It was really neat because Frank called us the day he was born to let us know and we were able to tell him that we had had Anne too! I think that Callum is like 8 hours older than her and so it is always nice to see their family.
After spending the afternoon over there we then headed down to Mountain View bowling (where I spent many an evening as a teenager) and we went bowling with our friends Craig and Joanna Nadeau. We have been really good friends with the Nadeaus since we all got married 10 years ago and we lived blocks away from each other. We usually have a double date night together once a month and tonight was supposed to be that night, but all of the youth in our stake are at a Stake Youth Conference and so there were no babysitters to be found! However, it ended up being a really fun night. We all bowled (and Abby beat me the first game, but I pulled out the win in the second game on the very last set!) and then we went to Wendy's for dinner! It was great! It was so much fun to be able to hang out with a family that we have known for so long and get along with so well!!
So I would definitely say that today's Family Fun Night was a huge success! We spent the whole day as a family and we were able to have tons of fun with a bunch of friends! YAY for Family Fun Night!!!