At church, they encourage everyone to have a family night once weekly.  While I agree with this in principle, I find it very difficult to work in a structured family home evening where there's a lesson and a song and someone makes refreshments.  We don't even shoot for that most weeks. We generally try to do something together, but it doesn't always look like a traditional family night.  It ends up looking more like this:  

Adults: "OK, what are we going to do for family night?  Who wants to choose?"

Children: "MOVIE!!"

Adults:  "How about something else?"

Children:  "NO!! MOVIE!!"

Adults: *sigh* "Fine, whatever. What movie?"

Children then proceed to fight about which movie to watch until both are screaming at each other and at least one is crying. Adults try to get them to come to a consensus.  Children do not listen.  Adults threaten children with No Movie At All if they continue to fight about it.  Fighting continues.  Both children are sent to respective rooms and slam doors.  End scene.

Family nights would be a whole lot more fun without the family part.


The Dormouse picked up an idea from a Sunday School lesson at church and wanted to do it together for family night last week.  Here's how she introduced it:

Dormouse: "Back in the olden days, like the 1800s, when they didn't have TV, or video games, or computers, or telephones or books..."

Us: "Wait, they didn't have BOOKS?"

DM: "Well, maybe they had books."

Us: "They had books."

DM: "OK.  Well, either way, children had to entertain themselves.  All they had was a broom to do it.  So they just made up stupid games with a broom. Like this one."

If that's not a selling point, I don't know what is.  I'm hoping she goes into advertising for the Parker Brothers Corporation one day.

Basically, you sit on the floor with your feet together, both grabbing a broomstick:


and try to pull the other person over.


What was hilarious was watching the over-confident Dormouse set up this game with her four year old sister and be ready to win hands down with little or no effort. What she wasn't prepared for was The Caterpillar immediately picking her up off her butt and throwing her over her shoulder onto her head.

That Caterpillar is strong.