Papa, what are we doing this weekend?
You have a little over 900 weekends from the time your child is born until they head off for college.
This number may feel like a lot of opportunities, but they can get used up quicker than you might ever realize. Watching your kids grow up feels like it can take forever, but looking back it feels like no time at all.
The Forever Conundrum
Wasn’t she just in diapers a few minutes ago?
This thought crossed my mind watching my oldest daughter leave for her first day of high school last year. My number of childhood weekends with her has dropped to around 150 at this point.
While you are in the process of raising your kids, it can feel like the process takes forever. However, every once in a while you take a moment to look back and reflect on the experience so far and it feels like the blink of an eye.
This is what I think of as the Forever Conundrum. Thinking you have all the time in the world, yet not realizing that your time is limited and you are quickly exhausting opportunities.
My youngest daughter is currently 10 years old, which means that 900 number above is less than half of what I started with, and she’s only in the 5th grade. Time flies when you aren’t looking.
Can I share a secret with you?
I can lessen the effect of the Forever Conundrum by creating more significant memories through unique experiences with my kids.
By utilizing our 900 opportunities as often as possible, I try to create many unique memories through our experiences. Our minds tend to streamline similar experiences when creating a memory, making your memory of the time feel shorter than it actually is.
In this article from Scientific American, they talk about the Holiday Paradox:
Our brain encodes new experiences, but not familiar ones, into memory, and our retrospective judgment of time is based on how many new memories we create over a certain period. In other words, the more new memories we build on a weekend getaway, the longer that trip will seem in hindsight.
When all we have are similar experiences, our brain doesn't go to much effort to record them to memory. Habit will make us feel safe and comfortable, but also enhances this process of time speeding away behind us. Creating new experiences will record more to your long term memory, slowing that rush of time down.
We need to break our free time habits and actively look and create new opportunities to avoid the Forever Conundrum.
So, where do you go?
What do you do?
How do you fill that time well?
“Let’s go to the zoo and use our membership!”
If you are lucky enough to live close to a zoo and happen to have a membership, how often can you really use it? Let’s look at a two-month breakdown of days available.
So, let’s say you go to the zoo on the first Saturday of these two months. Can you go again next Saturday? The Saturday after that? How long until your family is saying “not the zoo again?”
Memberships are often a fantastic value. Typically for the price of 2-3 visits, you can get a pass to visit for the whole year. But if we are giving our potential visits an honest assessment, you probably can’t visit more than once every two months unless you want to create burnout.
My approach to using memberships is to use them as a fallback. Typically, as I approach the weekend, I already have a plan for what we might be going to do. I might even have a couple of plans. However, sometimes circumstances don’t allow me to plan ahead, or possibly (temporarily) run out of ideas. It’s in those times I like to dig out memberships I currently have and put them to use. Maybe you planned on heading out for a hike, and it’s been rained out? Use that membership to the kid’s science museum!
In another article (A 1-2-3 Day Trip Plan for Successful Family Adventure), you can read about several different types of day trip outings you might consider taking. You might use this as a starting point to gauge your energy for the day and how much effort you might want to put out.
Walk
Hike
Summit
Visit
Tour
Bike
Once you can categorize the type of activity you want to do, it’s going to be easier to narrow down the adventure you will have for the day. If you are looking for more ideas on how to create a solid plan and want to see some examples of adventures around the San Francisco Bay Area, have a read through that article.
Want more tips for successfully getting out for family adventure with your family?
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