Meek - 50 Evening Adventures

To our family and friends

Frances Lincoln Limited

74-77 White Lion Street

London N1 9PF

50 Evening Adventures by Tim, Kerry, Amy and Ella Meek

Copyright Frances Lincoln Limited 2016

Text The Meek Family 2016

Photographs The Meek Family, except where listed

First Frances Lincoln edition 2016

Digital edition: 978-1-78101-205-5
Softcover edition: 978-0-71123-755-1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted photocopying. In the United Kingdom, such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

TIM, KERRY, AMY AND ELLA MEEK

Do any of the following sound familiar:?

Is work consuming your life and eating into your family time?

Do you sometimes feel like you are living only for the weekends?

Are you stuck for ideas about what to do when you eventually get to spend time with the kids?

Do you want your children to spend less time on computer screens and in front of the TV?

Do you feel as if youre never off duty but always on call for work 24/7?

If you have answered Yes to any of these, youre not alone. Many parents are also struggling with how to manage a busy work life alongside the demands of family life and spending quality time with their children. By quality time we mean screen-free, outdoor time, full of interaction, fun and activity. Our fast-paced modern 21 st -century lifestyle and a culture that promotes long working hours often means that time with loved ones gets crowded out or, at best, relegated to the bottom of a long to do pile.

Well, its time to do something about it. 50 Evening Adventures is designed to help you achieve a more rewarding outdoor and adventure-filled lifestyle that is less orientated around work and more family focused. Weve written this book to help you adjust your work-life balance and inject some quality family time back into your life not only at the weekends, but also during the working week, between the hours of clocking off from work and the time the kids go to bed. These weekday periods from 5-9(pm) offer the perfect opportunity to squeeze in some bite-sized evening adventures.

You might be asking yourself How can I manage that if Im so busy all the time? Its a fair point, but hopefully this book will show you that with a little bit of preparation, some ideas of what to do and some advice on how to do it, anyone can find time to enhance their lives with a bit of excitement, a sense of reward and even a spot of adventure too.

Living for the weekends is often a default response, a survival mechanism for those caught up in a work-heavy lifestyle. While this may offer a temporary respite and a chance to come up for air and reclaim some much-needed family time, more often the weekend arrives and, what with the rush of the week before, little thought or preparation has gone into planning any structure or activities for the two-day break. Before you know it, the weekend has come and gone in a blink of an eye, Monday is here again, the manic schedule resumes and the weekend has been wasted.

Clichs about children growing up fast can take on an unnerving reality: they grow so quickly, blink and youll miss them, before you know it they are gone. Wishing time away can sometimes bring with it an emotional guilt about missed story times and wasted opportunities for spending time together. Indeed the very notion of living for the weekends means you are writing off five days out of every seven. 50 Evening Adventures allows you to take stock and begin to create a pro-active and creative approach to family time management.

Clocking off and staying disconnected from email and mobile devices is just as important for adults as it is children. Dont allow yourself to be on call 24/7. Allocate a minimum amount of time for winding down and eating (or preparing some food to take with you) then try to spend a night or two being active outside the house. Youll be surprised how energising it can be, even if you arrived home shattered and stressed from a hard day at the office. Instead of going for a solo run, think about some active exercise with which the whole family can join in. Start to think about the 5-9pm part of the day as much as you do the 9-5. Here are some of the fun family adventures and ideas in the book:

Suggestions of places to GO, from harbours and marinas to gardens and allotments and how to make the most of them.

Plenty of ideas for things to DO (make, build, investigate, climb, hide, paddle, cycle, explore, create)

A selection of recipes and cooking advice for a range of family-favourite meals that can be cooked outdoors with the minimum of equipment to allow you to eat out in style together and make the most of your time outdoors.

Sensible guidance on health and safety considerations to help you keep you and your children safe and happy.

An abundance of tips and advice for getting the most out of your midweek evening adventures.

If you like the sound of this, and youre already excited about the prospect of clocking off and living less for work and more for family time or you just simply need some ideas and inspiration then read on and start preparing for your first weekday evening adventure.

A beach is synonymous with fun and excitement, and a blast of sea air is the perfect tonic after a hard day at school or at work.

Whether you can get to a beach easily or not depends on where you live; lets face it, if your home is not near the sea, getting to a beach of an evening is going to be a little bit difficult. But for those that do live near a coast, there are no excuses for not hitting the sand, except perhaps for a high tide!

Beaches are great places in which to spend time with kids. There are plenty of opportunities for children to play creatively in a large space with a degree of freedom, while at the same time staying safe. These are sensory-rich places: feel the sand between your toes, the acoustic rhythms of the sea and the breeze kissing your face. Cliffs, meanwhile, offer the opportunity to go on a fossil hunt below them and enjoy the great views from the top of them.