The first time I heard it, it sounded ridiculous. How do you schedule FUN? You can’t force fun, it either happens or it doesn’t. But what I’ve learned is, it’s much more likely to happen if there’s room for it. So, I scheduled Fun Adventure Friday. Every Friday, I pick Buster up from school and we do one thing, anything, together, just for the fun of it. Sometimes we go to his favorite playground. Sometimes we indulge in before-dinner frozen yogurt with sprinkles. Sometimes we bake cookies. Sometimes we ride bikes. We had a card house building challenge. One Friday we used a glue gun and decorated old baseball caps with leftover buttons. Fun Adventure Friday is nothing major and requires relatively little expense or planning.
Fun Adventure Friday is just time together. It doesn’t really matter what we do. It matters to both of us that my only job at that moment is doing that thing with Buster. He is my only focus, not folding laundry or making dinner or answering work emails or reading the paper. Just the two of us doing something, anything, together. Learning how to do that – to just be with my son for that time – was hard. I found it was important to schedule it, like an appointment or a meeting, so that I could give myself permission to take the time away from all the other things I “should” be doing. More often than not, it has led to spontaneous, good old-fashioned fun.
