I have always wanted to schedule a regular Hasbro Game Night for our family because spending time together and creating happy childhood memories is extremely important to me. The problem is that our household is a less than leisurely one. Our weekends are always filled with chores, errands, and events. A typical weekday for our children would be school, homework, dinner, bath, and bedtime. We also manage to squeeze taekwondo classes in there twice a week after school.
I am a little disappointed in myself for not putting my multi-tasking skills to work before now, but it only recently occurred to me that the solution for being too busy to fit in a Family Game Night regularly is to combine dinnertime with game time! Our children are 5.5, 5.5, and 8.5 years old, so they have not yet reached the age when they will be missing family dinners for other activities. I need to take advantage of the time we spend together during dinnertime now.
The first step to planning a Family Game Night Dinner would be to make sure you have several board games that can be played by the number of people in your family. In our case, we needed a game that would allow at least 5 people to play at once. I really only had a couple that were easy enough for our kindergartners to play, so I decided that I should pick up a new game when I went shopping for the other things I needed for dinner.
The next step would be to pick up some easy no-mess kid-friendly food for dinner. Tyson Chicken Nuggets, Ore-Ida French Fries, and Heinz Ketchup for dipping seemed like the perfect meal solution. They are all things I know my children love and the key to a fun Family Game Night Dinner is to have zero fussing about the food, so that we can focus on the fun! This includes minimizing your time preparing dinner and cleaning up afterwards. If you do not have a dishwasher, then go ahead and use paper plates and cups, so there will be more time for playing. The only "extra" thing I did was sprinkle garlic salt and a little pepper on the fries before I put them in the oven.
I was able to find everything I needed in one shopping trip to Walmart, except for the extra fries. I already had a partial bag of Golden Crinkle French Fries in the freezer, but wanted some extra in case what I had on hand was not enough. I ended up picking up a bag of Hash Browns instead, but it turned out we did not even need them.
To get the fun started, ask your children to break the rule about not playing with their food by building something cool with their fries and chicken nuggets. One of the adults will choose the winner, who will then be able to pick which game the family will be playing during dinner.
Our youngest son won the building contest! He built several small things rather than trying to use all his food to build one structure. My favorite concoction is his french fry sandwich, which used two chicken nuggets as the bread.
I was hoping our son would choose the new Pictureka game I had picked up, but he opted for the Star Wars Operation game instead. I really did not mind his choice because I rule at Operation! (What? No, none of this let the children win nonsense for me.)
I am a member of the Collective Bias™ Social Fabric® Community. This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias™ Tyson and Heinz #CBias #SocialFabric #DipDipHooray. All opinions expressed are my own.
