Do learn hard into your to-do list? Do you plan a ton of travel? Lots of unstructured time? I’ve been thinking a lot about how we structure our own family weekends…
What’s an average weekend like for you?
(Last weekend I tried to keep my camera on me and took some photos documenting our average weekend at home. I never take enough pictures of our daily life)
At first I had entitled this piece, What’s A Perfect Weekend Like For You, but then came to the conclusion that the conversation I wanted to have wasn’t really about that at all. Everyone has weekend dreams of romantic getaways, major house organization, and late night boozy dinner parties with good friends.
But, what are your weekends really like? How much thought and planning do you put into an average weekend, would you say? Do you like a lot of structure? Not much at all? Is this all purposeful and strategic or do you find yourself falling into patterns week after week? Do you like the patterns you’ve created?
There are times that our weekends are jam packed, and other times when it feels like weekends come and go with virtually nothing on the agenda at all. I used to dread those unscheduled weekends. This past Christmas holiday we had more than a week of completely unscheduled time. I have to be honest, it terrified me as it approached.
Looming unscheduled time. What would we do??? Would the kids go completely insane? Would Jared and I go completely insane? (Well, both happened, yes). Although, there ended up being a bit of magic in it all. In waking up and not having a plan in place. Letting the day take its course without any direction and completely spontaneously. Letting the kids have an idea, and going for it. I ended up loving it.
It made me re-think our family time at home, especially weekend and holiday time. So, since then- over the last couple of months I’ve made a conscious decision to not schedule our weekends. Or at least minimal scheduling.
In this piece, Have a Happier Weekend, they recommend scheduling 3-5 ‘anchor’ events, although that seems like overkill to me especially with little kids that require constant attention, even during the downtime. I’ve found that more than 3 events (baseball game, a dinner party, an organizational project) is too much. If there’s more than that, the spontaneous downtime gets lost and in some cases, completely absent from our weekend. I don’t like that feeling of being busier on a weekend than a weekday.
There are some great ideas in this article as well about how ‘successful’ people plan their weekends (although how are they determining ‘successful people’, exactly?). Flexing a different muscle (great idea), taking a break from social media (yup, highly recommend that), maximizing weekend mornings (wait, but then when do we get to sleep in??), and plan something for Sunday night to avoid those Sunday night blues.
What’s an average weekend like at your home?