Have you dedicated some time lately to really thinking about your family's daily activities and how you are finding fun in every day together? A few years ago, I started creating and tagging ideas for big accomplishments or goals that I wanted to put out there for our family. I realized quickly that some were so big they weren't going to happen overnight - they'd take planning and money and time off of work. So I started "chunkifying" the ideas. How can we make every day special? How can we create this special time block each and every day to detach from the worries, the homework, the social media trance, and just have some true, old-fashioned fun? It can't be difficult, it has to be easy. It has to be spontaneous but yet require some pre-thought (for things like supplies, etc.). It has to contain favorite activities that each family member will find enjoyment in. It has to allow for various weather options and be applicable to anywhere we may be (i.e. if we're visiting Nana). Here are the steps we followed, and continue to follow, in creating and completing our Daily Family Bucket:
1. Spend some time doing some research and selecting activities that sound right for your family's interests. My family loves travel, art, being outside, building forts, and science, so I found things that they'd really get excited over.
(See next post with an entire list of links and ideas for creating this list.)
2. Make an exhaustive list and put anything and everything on it that sparks your interest. You can eliminate ideas later, but put it all down to start working from and saving for future buckets.
3. Narrow your list down to 50 or so items. Keep is simple initially as you will learn so much in your first 30 days of drawing from your bucket. We have found it most exciting to keep the list a secret, so every draw is a surprise. Every family member does get to add their favorite one or two activities to increase the anticipation on every draw, but each pull is unknown and always results in a great reaction that keeps the fun alive.
4. Create some rules and guidelines for your system. Here are some things we came up with that have worked for us:
- Picking order. We started our process with the youngest person in the family in an effort to get buy in quickly from the most difficult to appease.
- Time. We made a rule that we would do our bucket picking right after homework/school activities were completed to create a reward for getting work done (work hard, play hard). Also, determine your time allotment for your Family Bucket. We do our best to keep it to a 60-minute block, knowing that there are meals, chores to do, and other requirements of our daily lives.
- Passes. We give every person one "pass" in which they can re-draw an activity and eliminate the one they chose from the bucket.. There may be times when certain circumstances, from a child's mood to a location to a desire to get their favorite activity, that may just not make sense for that day. That's ok, so we allow for one re-draw for each set of bucket activities (every 50 days).
- Time-outs. Kids are kids and there are definitely times where cooperation seems impossible and engagement just isn't happening. We have a "time-out" process, where we can pause for 5 minutes to pull it together and attempt the activity again. It usually works. We've also had rules where if one family member isn't being cooperative, they can have an individual time out and the rest of the family keeps going. For a time period, we also had a rule around "all or nothing" participation, where the fun would end if someone wasn't participating or being difficult. Family pressure seemed to help keep all on task and positively engaged. But know that over time and as ages change, we've adjusted our time-out rules.
5. Find a bucket, pail or container to fill with your bucket list activities. We use a beach bucket and have decorated it with paint pens. When we travel or are out of town, I move our activities into a collapsible bucket that makes it easy to transport.
6. Put your finalized bucket list activities on sheets of paper. I create my list in Excel and then print them out, then using a paper cutter to get the list into easy-to-fold sizes. You don't want the activities to be too small or too large, and I do my best to keep them all about the same size.
7. Get your family excited by creating some enthusiastic dialogue leading up to the day you launch your own Daily Family Bucket. Perhaps a big countdown every morning until you launch. We still talk about all the cool things we are going to do or add to our next bucket. We do a countdown for the Christmas Bucket or Vacation Buckets. We are always talking about future ideas and things we'd like to do.
Lastly, remind yourself this is all for fun, so enjoy it! If you're finding it to be a chore or you, your spouse, or your kiddos aren't getting completely jazzed over it every day, then you might need to adjust the how or the what. We started this as our girls were in preschool and they were pretty easy to fill with energy over our Daily Family Bucket; but as they've gotten older, I'm always looking for new ways to refresh and reimagine this time together. I do wish I had started this earlier in their life, even on the day they were born. Creating something to look forward to each and every day, creating a goal to accomplish together, creating memories and opportunities for learning, these are all magic moments that will ensure we are prioritizing each other --- and these all change and evolve over time which makes this even more special..
Enjoy the creating and launching of your Daily Family Bucket, and don't forget to share it with your friends and family (including us!).