Making Time to Take Time

          Wednesday has been established as “Game Nite” in our house. All of us here are gamers to some degree—I am the least-immersed of all of us, playing Dungeons & Dragons, table top games, and the occasional round of Magic, the Gathering (Badly, I might add. And I can’t play video games at all, despite the fact that I was a Pac-Man master at six). Husband and the boys D&D, Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh, and video game like pros, and I am happy to say that Littler Son is just as likely to pull out a board game as he is to switch the Wii on. Older Son is 21, so if he wants to park himself in front of his television for hours there’s really nothing I can do about it except throw socks at him from his doorway.

                I wanted a time for all of us to slow down and spend time together. Everything has been in an uproar for nearly a year, and we needed some winding-down time. Older Son was working overnights full-time; I was working and schooling and then looking for work and schooling; Husband was working all kinds of hours, and Littler Son was struggling with some school issues and parents’ schedules. For a couple years we also had a foster child which changed the family dynamic as well. He was reunited with his family a couple months ago and we are still working on reestablishing a family rhythm.  The weekends are usually so full of errands, housework, gardening, and whatnot that we don’t really take any time for quieter, closer-knit family activities unless we put a movie on in the evening. I realized that if I didn’t “make time to take time” we would continue this whirlwind of insanity we live in, and I don’t want that. Since we all enjoy games, setting aside a game night in the middle of the week seemed like a pretty good solution.

                We try not to play anything too complex (D&D is a weekend thing, and we set aside one weekend a month just for that!) because we still need to consider school bedtime (for a few more weeks, anyway), but Candy Land, GUBS, Gigamon, Uno, Once Upon a Time, Kodama, and Dixit are favorites. We visit Greenfield Games often; they are an independent game store in Greenfield, MA, and they carry all kinds of cool and quirky games like many that I mentioned as well as D&D supplies, trading card games, darts, and puzzles. They don’t carry many “traditional” games; I’ve never seen Monopoly or Yahtzee there, but those are easily found elsewhere.

                Taking time to focus on my family is so important to me, as it is to most parents in the workforce and at home. However, I realized that if I didn’t actually block the time off in my planner and on the calendar it wouldn’t happen. Not because I didn’t want it to, but because it’s too easy to get caught up in the things that I “should” do, overlooking the fact that what I “should” be doing is focusing on my family. Time goes by so very fast: Littler Son is already 8 years old; Older Son is 21 and working full-time; Daughter is 19, living in her own home with her boyfriend, and newly engaged. I have wonderful memories of games played and stories read with my older children, and my little boy, and I want to keep making memories like that. So no, I haven’t dusted, and laundry needs to be folded, and the new college session just started Monday, but it can all wait. I’m taking time. 

                Check out Greenfield Games:  http://www.greenfieldgames.com/    Stop in if you’re in the Greenfield area sometime; it’s great!