Tell me about any fun family traditions…

[cheshiredog]

That you have in Spring/Summer that are basically ‘no money fun’ and don’t cost the Earth.

We do Pizza Nights, Movie Nights, Spa Nights, Craft Nights. Football Evenings, if it’s on. We drive to spot wildlife. We sometimes do breakfast in the garden on warmer days. Every year, we paint pebbles with funny faces to put round the estate for people to find on their summer walks.

Just interested in what others do and would love further suggestions for keeping the kids busy and to give them things to look forward to.

Our kids are 16 and 10. We do tons of walking and hiking. We live on the edge of a city but there are footpaths virtually from our door, out to the hills about 3.5 miles away.

We also do a lot of cycling on canals and trails. There is also a cycle track not far which is cheap.

The local leisure centre provider offer a lot of cheap activities over their numerous centres too.

We also do family movie nights and an Easter egg hunt, that the 16 yo still participates in, lol!

When the kids were younger we used to do riddles/clues hidden around the house, leading to "treasure". I used to do obstacle courses in the house and out to the garden too. Baking and cooking together as well. Competitions like which of them could do the best painting and saying why the winner won. They also spent ages doing dancing competitions and, believe it or not...who could do "the lightest leap" across the living room, or the "loudest jump" or whatever!

We have the Easter treasure hunt. Tbf I'm always a little sorry I introduced it, as my youngest is now 15yo and I get roars of horror if I suggest we stop it.

When they were small they all had their own clues leading to their Easter egg. So pre-reading it would be a picture of a door, they'd go to the door and there'd be a picture of the fridge etc. until they found their egg.
Once reading they'd get rhyming clues.
Once they hit teenage I've done a variety of different ones, sometimes cooperative, sometimes individual.
My favourite was the year (I think they were aged 13yo down to 7yo) where they went out together with scooters round the estate to find clues along the lines of "For the next clue, go down Chestnut Crescent and find house number 2. The clue is the 4th letter of their house name".
They collected letters and then all had to rearrange the letters to find a clue where their egg would be back at home. We had 2 hours of peace!!!
They weren't so keen on that, so they get codes, sometimes tasks to do, and all sorts. It takes them around an hour to sort out.

Another tradition we have is watching shooting stars (Perseid meteor shower) on the trampoline in the summer. We take duvets out after dark and all lie there and watch for hours.

When they were smaller we used to do games' afternoons. We'd normally start with monopoly (we always set a time when we finished, normally about 45 minutes, and if it was still going well, add more time in 15 minute increments), then play cards and finish up with a film, normally with popcorn.