A Little Time Can Be a Lot of Fun


Our schedules are extremely busy, between work, school, family, support groups and church we have several responsibilities to meet each week.  By the end of the day we are beat.  It seems like we never really have the time to do some of the things we enjoy as a family.  My husband and I like to unwind by sitting down and watching a movie together and Gess likes playing games.  Lately it seems that I never have time for any of those things, so we came up with a solution.

For awhile my husband and I were watching television shows instead of movies, because they don't require as much time.  However, we find it difficult to find quality programming that we both enjoy.  So instead we decided that we would watch as much of the movie as we could before shutting it off and falling asleep.  The next evening we would watch some more.  We ended up watching the entire Lord of the Rings series (including The Hobbit) that way.  It works really well.  Besides, what law says a movie can't be interrupted?


We have also done the same for game night.  Some games just can't be played in half an hour and while there are games that can, sometimes that is not the kind of game you want to play.  Gess is really loving Monopoly but that takes a lot of time so what we do is play in 1 hour segments every weekend.  One night a week we break out the board and play.  When the time is up we get ziploc bags and place our pieces in them and we put the dice in the person's bag who goes next.  We write down where each player is on the board and take a picture to remember where our all our houses and hotels were placed.  It's been really nice to carry the game on this way.


It's refreshing to have a new perspective on things.  I refrain from so many things for lack of time.  Now if I only have 20 minutes I exercise anyway.  That is certainly better than not doing it at all because I don't have the 30 to 40 that I usually prefer.  Sometimes it takes me forever to finish a book but at least I am reading rather than thinking that I don't have enough time to enjoy it. 

Of course there are things that require time and we prepare for that.  I try to find one day a week where we spend time with the grand kids, I want that time to be rich in both quality and quantity.  I get up early to have enough time for prayer and of course our school schedule is rather strict.  I rarely miss any meetings and actually schedule a time each week to prepare for lessons that I have to teach.  However, because of all of these obligations it's nice to remember that I don't have to miss out on everything else, I just might have to enjoy it in increments.  That's OK though because it is still enjoyable no matter how much time you have!

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