Family Night - Our Family Unit

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April17th

Failed Family Night

Posted in: Family Traditions

As you know, we’re trying to have a Family Night once a month, where we set aside the night to do “kid stuff”. Well, this month has been busy, especially on the weekends, and we just were struggling to fit it in. I had the food already, so one night Kyle got home at a reasonable time and we just sort of spontaneously decided this would be the night. What a poor poor choice we made….

For dinner, I made hot dogs and mac’n'cheese – what kids wouldn’t love that combo? MINE! Berlin wanted nothing to do with the hot dogs and Kade wasn’t too sure about any of it. I had made these super deluxe chocolate peanut butter cookies for dessert, but the rule is, if you don’t eat your dinner you can’t have dessert. Well, we never did make it to dessert. In between trying to convince them to take bites, Kyle and I were spelling back and forth what the entertainment for the evening could be.

“How about the new V-I-D-E-O-G-A-M-E?”

“You mean the one with S-A-M the B-E-A-R?”

Meanwhile, Kade chimes in with “Q-B-E-A-A-V-D-O-P – what does that spell, Mom?”

I felt like I was living the SNL Will Forte Spelling Bee skit.

The evening went from bad to worse, by the end of dinner both kids were in tears and covered in ketchup. We gave them approximately a 20 second bath and put them both to bed an hour earlier than normal. No dessert was eaten, no video games were played. I think we were all just wiped out at the end of a long week and my check-box-personality tried to squeeze in something that had no business being there. Sometimes you just have to let things go, one day I will learn that…I hope.

I’m thankful to say that the next morning, the kids awoke bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with no seeming damage or scarring memories of the night before. Maybe it was a success after all.
February25th

Squishy Baff, Video Games, Family Portraits and Carrot Faces

Posted in: Family Traditions
Last Friday night was our third installment of Family Night (yes, it’s taken me over a week to get this post up!) This year we are trying to set aside one night every few weeks where things are focused on the kids. Fun kid-friendly food and a game or some entertainment done as a family. Our first night involved Pumpkin Pancakes and Angry Birds; the second, chicken nuggets and “tiny Legos” (known in other parts of the world as “Legos” but when compared to our favorite Duplo sets, they really are tiny).

Last Friday we kicked things off with a rare treat. Despite the fact that Kyle makes video games, Kade doesn’t play them much at all. (To be completely honest, I’m not including iPhone games in that statement. He does play games on my iPhone every morning for a bit as a reward for not talking before 8AM. Berlin is not as early a riser as Kade, so the iPhone is our current solution to one of the problems that comes from sharing a room.) All that to say, the kids were thrilled to play a few video games with Dad while I made dinner.

Dinner was Grilled Ham & Cheese, Carrot Sticks and the best Sweet & Salty Popcorn Balls I’ve ever had! The recipe is down below if you want to try it yourself. For once – popcorn balls that are not rock hard!

Since our theme last week during Homeschool Preschool was family, we decided to use our garage sale art kit to each draw a picture of our family. I used colors and oil pastels, Kyle drew his perspective with colored pencil, Kade loved using the water colors and Berlin used whatever she could get her hands on. It was such a relaxing time, and a great activity to do with young kids. They were both perfectly content to sit and create for well over 30 minutes.

After art (and markers) it was bath time. We gave Berlin a bath and then brought out one of Kade’s Christmas presents, Squishy Baff H2Goo. What a hit! If you haven’t tried the stuff, DO IT! Even if you don’t have kids! OK, that might be weird, but the next time you babysit then. Basically you add a powder to the tub water and it turns to semi-solid goo. Toys sit on top of it, your legs and feet get “stuck”, and it makes a great ‘PLOP’ sound when you dump it out of your hand.

Then when you’re ready to get out, you add another powder to turn it back into water. It leaves a little residue on the toys and tub (and kid) that you’ll need to rinse off but for $15 – bucket loads of fun.

It was a great night and we all had so much fun spending time with Dad. Kyle’s been working some long hours lately and it was so good for the kids to spend some quality time with him. They both can get a little moody towards Kyle when he’s gone a lot. Either they’re super clingy with him or they don’t want to have much to do with him (only Mom can tuck them in, only Mom can button their shirt, etc). It was good to have a night that was focused on them, where Dad was able to be super attentive to everything they wanted to share. It was also a great night for Mom and Dad to put down the to-do lists and walk away from the emails and just have fun and treasure our kids. So simple, but it gave all of us such joy!

Speaking of joy (or possibly just mouth happiness), the recipe for popcorn balls from All You magazine is below.
Sweet & Salty Popcorn Balls
Print

Recipe type: Dessert

Author: All You

Prep time: 25 mins

Total time: 25 mins

Serves: 16
Ingredients

4 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 cup packed light brown sugar

1/2 cup corn syrup

7 oz sweetened condensed milk

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

10 cups popped popcorn

1/2 cup salted peanuts, roughly chopped

1/2 cup toffee bits, such as Heath Bits ‘o Brickle

1/2 cup white chocolate chips

Coarse sea salt, optional
Instructions

Line a large baking sheet with parchment. Combine butter, sugar and corn syrup in a small saucepan over medium heat and cook, stirring occasionally, until butter has melted. Bring to a boil, add condensed milk and continue to boil for 5 minutes, stirring to prevent scorching. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla.

Place popcorn in a large bowl. Pour butter mixture over popcorn and stir gently to coat completely. Set aside until mixture has cooled enough so that it’s still sticky but won’t melt candy, 3 to 5 minutes. Toss in peanuts, toffee bits and white chocolate chips.

When popcorn mixture is cool enough to handle, grease hands with cooking spray or vegetable oil and roll mixture into 2″ balls (use about 1/4 cup per ball). Place balls on baking sheet. Sprinkle with salt. Let cool completely. Store in an airtight container at room temperature.
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2.2.1
January18th

Family Night – Pumpkin Pancakes and Angry Birds

Posted in: Family Traditions

I almost forgot I wanted to share about our first Family Night, if I don’t I will completely forget everything that happened since I didn’t take a single picture. So instead, let’s pretend that Kade did this to my kitchen when he was making dinner and that it wasn’t me who emptied the entire contents of the pantry in order to paint shelves this afternoon.

Kade and I made pumpkin pancakes with “raisin faces”, which to the untrained eye might have looked like raisin polka dots. Kyle suffered through one of my favorite traditions, eating breakfast food for dinner. He put on a brave face for the kids though, and was thankful for the bacon.

After dinner we played a new game that Kade had received for Christmas, Angry Birds. It was a fun night, nothing off the charts. But it’s another one of our New Year goals (I like that term better than resolutions). We are trying to be intentional about creating stability in Our Family Unit. We want to be building an atmosphere of unconditional love and acceptance, where we can all let down our guard and be exactly who we are without fear. One of the things that does that is Quality Time. We figure at 3 and 1, our kids are pretty happy to spend an evening with us; but unless we make it a regular part of normal every day life, they might have to be physically tied to a chair to do it when they’re teenagers. We want Family Night to be focused on the kids, to hopefully give them something to look forward to, where they’re in charge of food and entertainment, where we are willing to set aside parental control on nutrition and our definition of fun and let them pick.

Parenting…the Great Experiment…we’ll see how it nets out.