Piano recitals and baseball games, Saturday morning cartoons and full laundry baskets. Emails stacked up in your inbox, homework in every folder. How do you make your Saturdays count when there is so much to do? (And so much to distract you?)
For our family, since my husband often works weekends, the “Saturday” changes every week. But, most weeks, he has a couple of days when he is at home for most of the day. We have a baby who has no extracurricular activities, so our schedule is much simpler now than it will be in a few years. Still, though, we often find ourselves wasting the one day we have together. Mindless scrolling through Facebook and working on projects separately sometimes consume most of the day. I want to improve in this area, so I’m evaluating my week’s priorities. And I’m considering how we can make our Saturdays (or Thursdays, or Tuesdays) into valuable relationship-building time.
6 Ways to Make Your Saturdays Count
How to Treasure Family Time in a Busy World
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Get solo projects accomplished throughout the week whenever possible.
Ideally, we would work on projects together. But, realistically, some projects are not for two people. Maybe only one of us knows how to do electrical wiring in the house, or change the oil on the car. And the other has work-related emails to answer, or a toilet to clean. (How many people does it take to clean one toilet?) So we can try to do those projects when we couldn’t be spending time together. When my husband is away for work, he can be getting paperwork done and I can go grocery shopping. (Now that Baby J is more cooperative about shopping with me!)
The difficulty with this approach, of course, is that sometimes we need our spouses to be a babysitters during large projects. (For example, if I’m painting a large dresser, or a whole room, I’m not going to have time to finish during one nap.) And that’s fine. But if our alone time is always spent watching movies when we could have been accomplishing things on our to-do list, we should at least consider a change.
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Reduce outside activities when your family could be together.
It’s great to meet friends for lunch, or hang out after work with our buddies, or take the kids to play dates. However, sometimes those cut into family time. Dads end up knowing their peers at work better than their own wives and children. Children know their peers better than their own siblings. Who will be there for us the rest of our lives? We hope the answer is family. To make that a reality, though, we need to make sure we really know each other. How? By spending time together, just as a family.
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Make time to talk with your spouse.
Of course, it’s easy for the wife to say, “Let’s talk.” We ladies want to share everything that has happened to us during the day, every thought on our hearts, and we usually want to hear what our husbands are thinking about, as well. Men are different from women. (Whoa! What???!) That is probably the hardest thing to learn about marriage. 🙂 Not all men are like this (my father is an exception), but many men have times they just want to sit and think about nothing. (My husband insists that it is, indeed, possible to think about absolutely nothing.)
So how do we prioritize getting to know each other better even after we’re married and, as my husband puts it, “we already know everything that’s going on with each other”? For some men, it might be helpful to have a list of questions to ask each other. My husband doesn’t like such structured conversations, so our best times for talking “deeper” are often while we’re doing other things. We take long walks (which our little buddy Baby J loves) when the weather is nice and talk about everything from finances to health to what we read in the Bible that morning.
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Save “fun things” for your free days.
You’ve been wanting to check out that new park or corn maze with the kids? Have a picnic with the whole family! You want to buy a new couch for the first time ever? Make it a family fun day of trying out couches at furniture stores!
If a filter needs to be replaced in our fish tank, David could just run to PetSmart on his way back from work and pick one up. However, Baby J loves pet stores. So we make trips to PetSmart a family affair. Baby J gets to admire the turtles and koi while Daddy finds the right filter (or bottle of water purifier, or whatever it is that we need).
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Eat meals together.
When our lives get pulled in 99 different directions, it’s easy to forsake the family meal. One person grabs a granola bar, another heats up a frozen pot pie, etc. But eating meals as a family can be the best part of the day, the time when you share what has happened to you at work, you read silly jokes to each other, or the kids tell about the science experiment that went Kaboom! Almost every meal my family had when I was a child was a shared meal, and I still treasure the memories formed around the dining room table my dad made for us.
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Be intentional.
Hiking together. Photo by Ashim D’Silva.
Watch a movie that you think would be great for the whole family to see, rather than just keeping it on as background noise all day long. And then, turn it off! Visit your grandparents. Go outside together and explore the outdoors. Plan activities the whole family will enjoy, and try to get everyone to leave their electronic devices at home. Some families may set huge goals (hiking the Appalachian Trail one Saturday at a time, for example). Others have smaller, more easily attainable goals, like cooking one meal a week together. (Family Cookbooks on Amazon
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)What are some ways you make sure to make your Saturdays count? I’d love to hear from you!
