F.F.F.

Do you ever feel like you just don’t have time to build on your family?  Your time together is so rare, because people are always coming and going? 

I sat down the other day, to watch a few minutes of TV while I waited for company to arrive at our home, and Leave it to Beaver was airing.  I was dumbfounded to see this family sitting around the dinner table, and June Cleaver serving them a meal that it appeared she had spent hours slaving over to prepare.  Years ago that may have been easy, (doubtful, but she sure makes it look that way!), but today, in all honesty, our family looks nothing like that!  There are MANY days where Steve gets home from work only to find our house looking like a Fischer price hurricane just hit, and his “lovely wife” appearing worn out with no make-up on and my outfit covered in vomit from a recent explosion!  I am far from the incredibly together, and beautiful kept “June Cleaver” I once dreamed of being.  Dinner is not even close to making it into the oven, as it most days, is still carefully sitting in the freezer, wrapped in the same package I bought it in at Kroger, days before.  Steve walks in and sweeps up our little boy into his arms and I race into the kitchen to see what I can conjure up in 15 minutes or less for dinner that has some sort of nutritional value and that tastes more than mediocre.  (Even as I writing this I just ran to the freezer to pull out chicken for dinner tonight…. thanks for helping me think ahead!)

Life is busy in our home, and from talking to most of our friends; life is busy in every home.  Maybe your home doesn’t look as wild as ours absolutely does, but perhaps you still struggle with finding quality time to spend with your family like we do.

I grew up in a home where F.F.F. was mandated on a regular basis.  What is F.F.F., you may be asking?  Forced Family Fun.  My brother, sister and I, along with our parents, would spend a day, an evening, or a few hours together doing something that at least one member of our family coined as “fun.”  (I say “at least one member” because there were several times when the “fun activity” was not exactly what I would consider fun.  I’m specifically remembering a full day of watching the Lord of the Rings Trilogy…. the extended version.  Fun to someone (not mentioning names), but not to me!) J

I wasn’t always wild at the idea, but looking back I have MANY memories with my family where we laughed and spent QUALITY time together, because of these F.F.F. times.  This, in-turn, caused us to be an incredibly tight-knit group, one in which we’re all great friends, and choose to be around each other, if given the choice, today!

In our home, we try to instill F.F.F. every week.  Right now, F.F.F. is any easy thing to incorporate every week…mainly because Caleb (our 11 month old) really has no opinion.  “Fun” equals whatever Steve and I want to do, which really makes it not so “forced”.  However, I’ve seen the value of F.F.F., and so our goal is to ensure that we spend quality time with our entire family at least once a week, no matter how old they get.  Whether this F.F.F. is a simple dinner we all spend around our table with the TV OFF, or an afternoon at the park with a tub of mint chocolate chip ice cream in tow, it will be a mandatory element to our week.

I challenge you to do the same!  Start this week by incorporating F.F.F. into your family routine! It doesn’t have to be a day-long Lord of the Rings trilogy extravaganza (please, for the females in your family like me, I implore you NOT to do that to them!), but try by starting with a simple night of the week in which you eat a meal together at home with no cell phones, TV, or other distractions in place.  You can do it!