Have a $15 Family Fun Night

•Dollar Date Night: Have Costco hot dogs and then head to your town’s local dollar theater.•Carpet Picnic: Spread out a blanket and have a picnic in your living room while watching borrowed VeggieTales DVDs. Serving something besides soup would be a wise plan on a night like this. •Pizza and Pinochle: Order a pizza (plan ahead and find a coupon) and have a family game night.•City Cinema: Pack some sandwiches and take advantage of a community-sponsored “Movies in the Park.” •House Movies: If you have a projector (or can borrow one) hook it up to your laptop and show a DVD on the side of your house while eating dinner on a picnic blanket or on lounge chairs. If you have a pool, you can take it one step further and do a “Dive-in Movie.” Grab some flotation devices and watch the movie from the comfort of your pool.•Hot Dogs and Hiking: Find a day-camp spot and roast hotdogs over an open fire after a walk in the woods.•Entertainment Anyone? Purchase an Entertainment book (www.entertainment.com) for super discounts on meals as well as family entertainment. If you have an indecisive child planning the family fun night, this would be a great help in giving them some ideas.

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• Airplane Food: Have a paper airplane competition. Go to www.10paperairplanes.com and create a variety of planes. They give great, step-by-step instructions that even older elementary age kids can follow. Younger kids will need Mom’s or Dad’s help. For dinner, have little packages of food (cheese and crackers, carrot sticks) as “airplane food.” • Karaoke Night: Borrow a karaoke machine or use your Wii, but make it an American Idol style night (but with only adoring fans—no harsh criticism). Pair it with a Make Your Own Sushi dinner. For less adventurous kids, their sushi can be made out of cooked chicken, ham, or cheese on top of rice. • Happy Hour Concert: Happy hour isn’t just for the after-work crowd anymore. Many restaurants are offering great food deals. We’ve found a restaurant that offers two-dollar burgers and another that does half-off appetizers—along with free live music. • Dig Out the Gift Cards: Recently, Roger and I went through all of my purses, his wallet, and the drawers in our desks and nightstands and collected all the gift cards we’d received for various occasions. It was a little embarrassing. We had over forty cards that had various amounts of money sitting on them. Suddenly, we have a lot of opportunities to use those up for dates for just the two of us or for some extra special family nights. I bet if you looked around the house, you would find some gift cards just waiting to be used on your next family night. A couple of times we even threw all the gift cards into a bag and picked one randomly to plan some family fun around. How excited was Roger when we had to figure out what to do with the Best Buy gift card?

Have a $15 Family Fun Night