Take advantage

Weeknights are busy and cluttered with scheduled events and the everyday life stuff like dishes and laundry and night time routines. This is why the couple of days that make up the weekend are so important to us with our kids. We get the (mostly) uninterrupted time to just spend quality time with them. Last weekend just happened to also be a long one with the boys being out of school and me being off work for a Monday holiday. You wanna know what we did? We went to the playground.

Yep...but not just one, we hit up 5 in 2 days! AND added an extra stop at the nature center. And you wanna know what else? The kids loved it! The weather was amazing all weekend and we took advantage of being outside for play. City park playgrounds are free (just in case you haven't been in awhile).

We also took advantage of it being a week day when a free indoor playground was going to be open. The total cash out of pocket for our amazing family weekend...$19 ($2 for a movie rental, $17 for ice cream).

The weather in central Illinois won't always be 70 degrees in the middle of February, but when it is, take advantage. Our weekend wasn't amazing because it was free, it was amazing because we had the chance to say, "let's go to the park" and not worry about the clock. We had the chance to keep the kids surprised about what we were going to do next because we didn't have anywhere else to be other than with them. We had the chance to see all the kids play and explore together. We took the chance to say yes to ice cream before dinner (I mean, who doesn't want ice cream before dinner?).

We took the chance to soak up this time with them...time that seems to be going way too fast. We took advantage of the free and it held way more value than we could have known.