Back to school? More like back-to-busy. Before you know it those slow days and relaxed evenings that were filled with family fun will be replaced by evenings that fly by with sports practices, after-school activities, and an absence of real family time. This year, plan to beat the busy by setting up simple family nights in advance. We like the idea of choosing one day per week to be designated as a family night. Once you have the day, here are five super simple family night ideas that will help keep everyone together. Family Game Night It’s a classic for a reason. One night per week, order a pizza, look the other way when the kids down 3 glasses of soda, and open a new board game. Make it a shopping adventure by taking the kids to Goodwill to pick a new game each week (or go once a month and buy 4 at a time). Acting silly and competitive together is fun no matter how old you are! Get Epicurious Get the kids in on your cooking skills! Invite them to make a menu and then prepare the meal together. Pizza parties work exceedingly well for this type of activity. We recommend a dance party for dessert. Community Care Community service is probably not your teenager’s idea of a good time. Maybe it’s not yours, either. But challenging yourself to serve the community, and potentially those who have less than you is a great exercise in appreciation and humility. You’ll be doing a good deed together and learning a great lesson in humanity. Scan your local community website for opportunities to help. Local nursing homes, soup kitchens, and animals shelters are also great places to help out. Living Room Campout Remember when the kids were tiny (or maybe they still are) and you could pass an entire day building a couch fort? Get back to that. Use blankets, towels, chairs, whatever you need to use to work on engineering skills and create an epic castle together. Then host a picnic inside, and maybe even an overnight slumber party. If the weather is still nice and you have a tent, take the party to the backyard. Overnight backyard sleeping is a ton of fun and, it’s free! Geocaching If you haven’t heard of geocaching yet − you’re missing out. Turns out there are tiny (and some not-so-tiny) treasure boxes hidden all over the world. Chances are you walk by at least one of these hidden treasures, called a geocache, a day. Try downloading the app for your smartphone. It’ll give you GPS coordinates to all of these caches. Track them down, sign the log, and take a prize from the treasure, if you like. Just don’t let people who aren’t in on the secret catch you! Remember – the point of family night is to enjoy each other. While you should try to avoid canceling your traditional family night, know that life gets in the way, and sometimes it’s better to take a week off than it is to force something into the schedule that just isn’t fitting. Happy back-to-school!