Fun Family Night Activities

Now that my kids are getting a little older, we have family night every Friday night. They love family night so much that sometmes we have to extend the fun to Saturday night too...even though that is supposed to be date night!

We started out just having a special dessert and then watching a movie, but that got old after a few weeks, so we've been experimenting with lots of new family night activities. I hope some of them will give you some ideas for your own family.

We always start by allowing our kids to choose dinner. We usually end up with something like pizza, or peanut butter and jelly, or french toast - but it's completely their choice.

Then we always have a fun dessert. Sometimes we make fancy truffles in wine glasses, sometimes our own Blizzards, and we have make-your-own sundaes a lot.

Now, for the family night activities. Some of our favorites are:

Play the Wii as a family. Bowling and tennis are great games to play together.
Start a fire and make smores. We tell scary stories too.
Build an indoor tent and "go to sleep" in it. Read books, play games, tell stories, etc. in our tent. Sometimes we even pretend we are camping.
Board games are a favorite at my house.
Have the kids prepare and put on a play. Sometimes they write in parts for us, sometimes they do the entire play and we are the audience.
Get out a video camera and tape eachother being silly.
Play non-board games like telephone, I spy, 20 questions, etc.
In the summer, camping out in the backyard is a family favorite
Arts and Crafts night is fun. Sometimes we work on our scrapbook, other times we just get out all our supplies and make whatever we feel like.
Around holidays it's fun to make and decorate cookies.
If all else fails, we let the kids "sleep" in our bed with us. We pop popcorn and watch a movie together.

I hope this gives you some ideas for family night activities that you can do with your family. We've had so much fun spending time together and I wouldn't trade our Friday nights for the world.