I wrote today on our Facebook Group asking for advice on weekends and specifically how to make them special. Apart from my husband being with us, which is wonderful, there isn’t a huge difference to the weekdays in our house. In some respects the week days are easier in our house as we have a routine, structure and learning during the week. Yet weekends seem to go a bit wrong as we all seem to have ridiculous expectations of our weekends- that can’t be met.

I also want my kids to look back on this difficult time with some nice memories too of the family things we did together and hopefully learn the importance of family.

So how do you make the weekends special when you can only go out for one lot of daily exercise a day due to coronavirus? And how do you stop them being, as my friend put it, a ‘blursday’ (love this!!) ?

Here are some ideas I’ve compiled from suggestions from Facebook, Twitter and real life (well..phone) conversations :

• Friday Night Film Night! My friend has done the most amazing thing with her little ones, creating a box office to ‘buy’ cinema tickets with her children for their very own film night.

• TV Dinner on Saturdays! We have been eating at the table and whilst I love that, it’s nice to relax the rules once in while so we are going to have TV dinners on Saturdays and all eat our dinners on our knees as a special treat.

• Dress up day! We had the idea that seeing as we no longer have an opportunity at the moment to wear our ‘best’ clothes that one day of the weekend we dress up in our nice clothes for fun! Or even fancy dress (although we did that today thanks to PE with Joe Wicks on Youtube)

• Special Breakfast– Sue Atkins on Twitter suggested this one and I like the idea of tying to a day- so the kids know, for example, that every Sunday it’s pancakes for breakfast! Or croissants! Something special to look forward to that wouldn’t happen in the week.

• Football Match! My son suggested this brilliant idea, and as of tomorrow Saturdays will be a family football match in the garden.

• ‘Me time’ for us parents– discussing this with my husband, we realised one thing that’s really important is that we both have some time to ourselves to do something we want to do. Whether it be play a computer game, read a book, go for a run etc. We shouldn’t feel guilty, especially at the moment, for having time to ourselves. We’ve written this into our ‘plan’ for the weekend now so that it happens!

• Gardening– another lovely friend suggested this fab idea of making your garden look nice on the weekend. She discovered that some garden centres are doing deliveries of plants, so with the weather hopefully improving again- some family time in the garden could be a lovely activity.

• Saturday Night Disco– I’m thinking glo sticks, loud music, lights off, disco ball (anyone still got one?) and crazy dancing in the living room!

• Zoom Family Gathering– I cant wait to do our zoom family gatherings this weekend, great to be able to see each other on the screen and chat. So grateful we have this technology. This was also suggested on our Facebook  group by a lovely friend of mine.

• Camping in the House! This idea, by one of our Facebook group members, is wonderful! Set up a tent in your house and let the kids sleep in it or play in it!

• Lie in– My husband and I now take it in turns on the weekend to have a lie in. This makes the weekend special in two ways as it means the kids get special time with one of us and the other one gets sleep! Single parents I think you are super heroes btw.

• Pj day– I don’t think we’ll do this, but it’s a lovely idea. Letting everyone wear pjs for the whole day!

• Family bike ride– Either out and about as your one form of daily exercise or as we’ve been doing, putting a brick under the kids stabilisers (I accept no responsibility for safety here!) and letting them cycle on their ‘turbo trainers’.

• Colouring club– My kids suggested this and we’ll be doing it every Sunday afternoon. Music on, crayons in hand and sitting down as a family to colour together. Therapeutic for all and sounds special if you call it a ‘club’.

• Lego club– As above…but with Lego. Everything is better when it’s a club!

• Board games– We’ve not yet played many board games as a family and that’s going to change now! I’m looking forward to introducing them to lots of board games.

• Family Cooking– Lastly on Sunday’s we are thinking of getting the kids involved with us all cooking Sunday dinner together. Sounds really magical.
• Visit a Museum Virtually!- My friend told me about this and it was also suggested on our Facebook group. It’s brilliant! You can now ‘visit’ museums via your smart phone, tablet or computer! Have a look in this article here .

What ideas do you have? Please share either in the comments or joint our Facebook group (here) and share on there.

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