Catholic Family Fun: A Guide for the Adventurous, Overwhelmed, Creative, or Clueless: A Guide for the Adventurous, Overwhelmed, Creative, or Clueless

By Sarah A. Reinhard

Looking for a way to bring your family together in faith and fun, but not sure where to start?
Discover how game night meets Catholicism in this guidebook of activities with strategies and suggestions for fun family engagement— with one another and with faith!
Adaptable ideas for storytelling, arts & crafts, meals, outdoor adventures, places to go... these are just some of the ways families can bond and deepen their faith, building a "domestic church" of their very own!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pauline Books and Media
• Release date: Mar 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9780819816160

Book preview

Foreword

I imagine all parents feel like this from time to time: We clothe our kids, give them food (frequently in nugget form), try to address their basic needs, take them to Church, and aim them down the sometimes difficult pathway of life, all the while praying and hoping and praying some more that we gave them all we could to help them be successful.

But what is real success when it comes to raising children? How do I know when my wife and I have been successful in helping our kids to be successful? It all depends on what you think successful looks like.

My definition of success has changed drastically as I’ve gotten older. When I was thirteen, success meant being a well-paid novelist selling as many books in a week as Stephen King does in a year. When I was in my early twenties, success meant simply supporting myself and being able to pay my rent each month by waiting tables. In my thirties, with a wife and children, success meant a mortgage and a dog and a paid-off car. Over time, monetary concerns have become less important to me, less central in my life.

Just recently both my wife and I hit our forties, and my definition of success has changed once again. Now, I just want to get to heaven and make sure my wife and kids get there as well. Success, to me now, would be seeing my children grow into adulthood and not just going to Mass each week, but constantly seeking out God in their daily lives. I want them to want God. Not because their mother and I want them to, but because they have chosen to make God a part of their lives.

If that happens, I’ll consider my life a success, despite the bumps in the road I seem to keep driving over a wee bit too quickly. If my kids hit forty and (assuming I’m still around) they say something like, The other day when I went to Confession, then I’ll know I’ve done all right. If our children regularly seek God’s love on their own and by His grace, I’ll be grateful.

But what am I doing to get them to that place? In between the fast food and hand-me down clothes, in between bath times and Sunday Mass, how much time am I really investing in my children? And if I’m not spending enough time with them, how can I do better?

In today’s electronics-laden world, I’m as guilty as the next social media friend for spending far too much time on all the distractions life has to offer when I could be investing that time in prayer and with my family.

In the past decade, I’ve been blessed to work from home for seven out of ten years. While we save a ton on gas, and I haven’t had to worry about a commute since 2006, one of the problems with this scenario is that over the years I’ve had to fight to find balance in my life. While I’ve no longer had to drive 100 miles a day, instead of giving that extra time to my wife and children, I’ve often filled up those hours by working extra hours.

How stupid is that?

What if, instead, I took that extra time and put it toward my current definition of success? What if I found a way to carve extra time out of my busy weeks and give that time to my children for the benefit of their eternal souls?

Yeah, it’s easier said than done, but it is doable. And Catholic Family Fun: A Guide for the Adventurous, Overwhelmed, Creative, or Clueless helps to make this goal not just a possibility, but a reality. How? By giving concrete strategies, methods, and ideas.

Maybe you’re already doing some of the things Sarah A. Reinhard recommends in this book, but I can guarantee you, Sarah’s going to challenge you to do them even better.

For several years, our own family has had a Family Fun Night tradition on Fridays of getting a couple pizzas from a local family restaurant and watching a goofy family movie. While this has been a great way of spending time together, it doesn’t really offer our children opportunities to grow in holiness.

In Catholic Family Fun, Sarah equips all of us parents who share the goal of getting our families to heaven with the tools for making real progress. Instead of just weekly pizza and a movie, Sarah brings our faith into the mix in a vibrant and tangible manner by suggesting ways we can serve others, meals we can make together, and adventures we can experience hand-in-hand.

Most importantly, in this book Sarah outlines ways that—as a family—we can grow in our prayer lives and in our relationship with God.

What Catholic Family Fun provides is not a road map, for no two families are alike. Instead, Sarah provides us with a much-needed toolbox for Catholic families, one filled with spirituality, fun, and the kind of love that encourages each family member to be even more open to the closeness God has already given them.

If you’re like me, and sometimes struggle to find balance between spirituality and responsibility in your family, Sarah’s suggestions will be a wake-up call. In this book, you’ll discover inspiration to keep pushing forward, to constantly seek God in your family life, and to help your children seek him as well.

Sarah A. Reinhard’s Catholic Family Fun is the kind of book that sits on the kitchen table where it collects years of coffee stains in between laughs and life moments and memories. It’s the kind of book that gets passed around on family trips in the van, its pages folded over and marked with discovery. Each great idea Sarah gives us helps us to be not only more successful parents, but more faith-filled families.

GREG WILLITS

Co-Founder of Rosary Army (RosaryArmy.com)

Co-Host of Sirius XM’s The Catholics Next Door

(TheCatholicsNextDoor.com)

Introduction

Our family loves to spend time together, and that’s the underlying theme in these pages. Faith and fun are not exclusive concepts, though we often act as though they are.

The purpose of a Catholic family fun activity is to have fun together. Keep it simple and remember that there’s time ahead of you and no need to fit everything into a single time slot. You will have many more opportunities to tweak and add.

When you gather for family fun, you can include more than just your immediate family—why not invite grandparents, close friends and their children, or your siblings and their children? Ask everyone to turn off the electronics and join you for the present moment. Keep your phone on the charger and your earbuds in your pocket for a few hours. Find out what being really present to one another can do for your relationships.

Use this book as a reference and companion, but know that I did not write it to be a step-by-step guide. My desire is to help draw your family closer, not lock you into ideas that may not work for you.

Modify, just as your grandma did with her favorite recipes. See this book not as a blueprint, but as guidelines, an outline with room in the margins for you to annotate, abridge, and revise. Don’t be afraid to use the margins to make note of your own ideas and things that worked well for you.

You might consider designating a special place for your family fun materials, such as a basket, a bin, or some shelves. This will give you a location for the things you’ll gather as you prepare.

This book is organized into nine chapters, ranging from a series of light-hearted activities to suggestions I hope will draw you deeper into the Catholic faith. With each activity, I offer suggestions for ways to further personalize the activities in the Faith Angle, Wider Angle, and Make It Yours sections.

The Faith Angle will help you add Catholic faith elements or connections to your family fun. Whether it’s a way to modify an activity or to see and do it from a different angle, this is where I’ve gathered the little ideas that could change your family fun into something even richer and more meaningful. Likewise, the Wider Angle sections are meant to help you integrate explicitly faith-oriented activities into life as a whole.

In the Make It Yours section after each activity, you’ll find additional thoughts about how you might adapt the activity. These tips will allow you to adjust your approach to family fun based on the number and ages of your family members, their preferences, and your family’s dynamic. I also include suggestions for age-appropriate changes, such as dividing your family into partners or teams to forge deeper bonds. Siblings can be paired, older and younger, in various ways, or a parent can be paired with opposite gender kids. Doing this can also be an ongoing lesson in tackling competition—or building it—constructively. If your family tends toward competitiveness, maybe you’ll find yourself urging them toward kindness even as you spice up the activity to keep it interesting for them. If your family doesn’t have a competitive streak, then you might have a totally different way of dealing with competition.

On the book’s website, www.Catholicfamilyfun.com, you’ll find the resources I’ve used and recommend. There are notes within each chapter and within the activity descriptions to let you know when there is additional content on the website. If you don’t have the time or inclination to visit the website, this book will still serve as a complete guide all on its own.

My prayer for you is that, in some small way, this book will join the beauty of the Catholic faith with the fun of family life, and create a set of activities that you will experience as both memorable and instructional.

May God bless you and your family as you journey—and have a blast!—together.

PART 1

Are We Having Fun Yet?

It’s hard, sometimes, to just have fun. For one thing, fun means different things to different people. For another, letting your hair down can be uncomfortable, especially if you are invested in a certain approach to things. Having real fun and really enjoying yourself can be a hurdle sometimes, especially if the idea is new.

If you have young children, you may find that the hurdle you face is exhaustion or being overwhelmed with all the other things that need to be done.

I’m giving you permission, right now, to let go of those things that weigh you down and keep you from relaxing and having fun with the most important people in your life—your family.

Getting everyone in your family on the same fun page can be a challenge, but it can be done. Convincing everyone that they want to participate can be a headache, but it is worth the time, effort, sweat, and words.

And, sometimes, fun is something you don’t realize you’re having until you look back on something, especially if you’re in a certain age range.

So, with these chapters, let go of your need for perfection and settle into the comfortable laughter that can only come while you’re in the presence of those you love—and those who love you—unconditionally.

Chapter 1

Silly Things to Do Together

Sometimes, the best way to be together is to just let your hair down and be silly. If you can’t put on a funny face with the people in your house, who can you be comfortable with?

Have you ever pictured Jesus smiling or, better yet, laughing? Perhaps the reason so many people have trouble getting close to God, Mary, or the saints is that we don’t think of them as smiling. It’s impossible to be silly without smiling, so, in this section, let’s just be silly! Here are some ideas to get you started.

Be Crazy

Prep: Little or none

Duration: Less than 1 hour

Cost: Low

This is balm for cabin fever, whatever the weather. You