How to get more quality time with your family

Quality time, are you doing enough of this? Life is so rushed, we work, the kids go to school and we live from weekend to weekend. Sometimes you just need to schedule some time together on the weekend, but how do you do that?

Weekends

The weekends here are often spent sleeping in and taking it easy. Not surprising either, since the whole week is busy with work, school and sports. On the weekends we don’t have to do anything and we like to be at home as a family. We often walk around the village, but there are also weekends when we do little else but rest, read and watch a little TV.

We do often have big plans, of ‘we should go away more often’.

More quality time

All four of us climb and going to Belgium for a weekend to climb is a great moment of quality time as a family. In recent years we have not been able to go out much on weekends because the boys had soccer matches. Now that they have stopped doing this, we want to go climbing more often.

Now it is true that since a year we have a cat, so when we want to go out it goes to the babysitter. Before we got a cat from the shelter, I looked into finding someone to take care of our pet when we weren’t around. This was also a reason why we haven’t had a pet for years. To my luck, I found an address nearby, where the cat can go when we are on vacation or away for a few days sometime.

So climbing is definitely coming up again this year.

No obstacles to go away

So you would say that there are no more obstacles to getting away for the weekends and having quality time with the family. What sometimes stops us is the cost. Consider, for example, a day at the zoo or amusement park, which just costs a lot of money.

But not everything has to cost money and those might just be the fun things to do. Only sometimes you just have to think of those too. Holland is so beautiful!

Try to figure this out and we did.

A day at the dunes and beach

Last year we spent a weekend in Schoorl, just the two of us. This is where we had such a good walk, that we decided to go again this year, but this time for a day with the boys. We parked the car at the outdoor center and started walking the blue route here. This was the same hike as last year and we knew how beautiful it was.

Through the woods and the dunes we walked to the beach and back through the dunes and the woods. We walked for over two and a half hours and it was lovely. The surroundings beautiful and the sun shining. In the end, this day out costs you nothing, besides your gas, but we super enjoyed it as a family. We were actually surprised how well the boys ran.

They do get a little older and still like to nag a little ‘nag’ when we hike a bit, but they enjoyed it as much as we did.

An evening out

Enjoying quality time together can also be done in other ways. We recently spent an evening out together. We went to Walking With Dinosaurs at the Ziggo Dome.

We really do this too little and right, it costs money. But when I saw how the boys were enjoying themselves, I still think. ‘maybe not at all wrong to save for this once in a while’and make memories as a family.

Visiting a city for a weekend

But what we also want to do is go away for the weekend more often. And then not only to climb, but also to visit cities. Last year we were married for ten years and to celebrate this we went to Disneyland and Paris with our family, now of course this was an exception. We certainly don’t do this every year.

But we saw how our children also enjoyed Paris. That is why we decided to visit a city more often. If you look carefully, the hotels do not have to be expensive at all and for example, we ourselves always choose not to have breakfast in the hotel, but in the city itself.

A weekend may cost a bit, but when I see what a lot of money it saves to have breakfast outside the hotel, I’m happy to do it and it’s fun too.

On these sometimes small things like just a walk through the dunes, we want to ensure more quality time with the family.