Creating Family Memories: How to Make Family Time with a Crazy Schedule

By Julie Plagens

Are you having a hard time creating family memories because you have a crazy schedule? I understand how you feel. This book shows how I changed things. If you read this book, you will learn the 3 levels of creating family memories, how to make meaningful memories with your kids, and a flexible schedule to get you started. Your family will never be the same when you implement these easy family habits. They are fun, create bonding, and will give you the best moments of your life with the ones you love. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Julie Plagens
• Release date: Jul 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386090540

Julie Plagens

Julie is a wife, mother, teacher, blogger, and author. Before she married, she taught Speech, Drama, and English for three years in the Richardson Independent School District. After she married, she became a stay-home mom. Julie has volunteered for many years locally and in South Texas doing VBS, food distribution, and door-to-door witnessing. Now that her children are grown, she is a substitute teacher for a private school in Dallas and works intermittently for her husband After a heartbreaking estrangement from her family, Julie realized she was not alone in her feelings of shame and her struggles to interact with family in a healthy way. Now that she has reconciled with her parents, she wishes to help others find hope when they experience a family rift or a family break. When Julie is not talking about reconciliation, she is sharing helpful tips on her blog about family, parenting, marriage, education, and faith. Julie lives with her husband of 25 years in Dallas, Texas.

Book preview

Creating Family Memories

Creating family memories can be a challenge when you have so many things pulling at you as a parent. If you sat down right now and looked at your schedule, would you be overwhelmed with what your family is doing this week? Or maybe you are overwhelmed with your crazy schedule today!

There are sports activities, music lessons, church events, and meetings to attend with not enough time in the day to do it all.

Many of you have a job on top of all these activities. It is enough to make you want to run and hide, hoping it will all go away.

It seems like everyone in the family is crossing paths with barely even a hello. I know how you feel. Your schedule can get crazy when the kids get older.

So how do you slow things down and start creating family memories when you can’t even get two words in with your children? Especially if they have a cell phone!

I am going to give you some suggestions to help you start creating family memories together. They worked for my family and they will work for your family, too.

I have one adult child who is now independent and one teenager who is in college. I think if you asked them, they would say we had some wonderful times together and created great family memories.  Some of our fun times together as a family were actually very meaningful times (without the cell phone).

It is important to remember being together as a family is not always child-centered. It is a mix of kid fun, family fun, and other-centered fun. It is the combination of these three things that will help bond your family together.

Most parents stop at the kid fun and don’t work on the other two levels of family bonding-family fun and other-oriented fun.

It takes all three levels to create the most well-balanced family memories. 

Before we get into the three levels of family fun, let’s talk about your schedule. If you don’t have enough time to schedule family activities, then you will be missing out on some of the greatest adventures with the people you love the most.

If your schedule is crazy, it is time to reevaluate your commitments. Going places and doing things can be good to a certain extent, but not when it is at the expense of the whole family.

If you are wondering what to cut, I recommend you look at your child’s sport's schedule first. This is usually where most families are spending their free time.

Between practices and games, you may be gone most nights and all weekend. I recommend you limit each child to one sport per season. Anything more may be too taxing on the whole family.

It is not only the time commitment, but the money commitment that takes away from other activities you could be doing together. Many sports cost hundreds of dollars because of fees, lessons, and equipment.

It becomes especially expensive and time-consuming when you get into competing on the Club level. It can be thousands of dollars with travel. That is money you could be spending on vacations, day trips,