12 Family Adventures. January – Den Building

Do you ever feel that the weeks just whizz by and the weekends disappear right before your eyes? Many of our weekends pass in a haze of dancing lessons, decorating and doing up our house and endless jobs. Obviously, getting the basic jobs done is a necessity of a weekend but this year, whilst doing our annual thankful New Year’s Star Resolutions, I was thinking that I wanted to do something a little different to help make this year a little more memorable. I do love January. I love that the weather is cold. I love that there is the prospect of snow (although we only had a dusting this year.) I love hibernating, and cosy jumpers and blankets. But I also love the planning phase – the excitement of a new year and all there is to look forward to. Last year we had lots of fun family adventures and some lovely family moments. I loved our woodland walks in France, our Go Ape tree climbing experience and our first family festival was a lot of fun. We had some special family adventures in Ireland and even our first canoeing experience (which was a little hairy at times) is something I’ll always remember! So this year, we wanted to try some new things and make the most of our weekends together as a family and so we’ve created 12 Family Adventures with The Ladybird’s Adventures.

12 Family Adventures

As a family, we picked out some things we’d like to do plus a couple of ‘more adventurous’ things that I thought I would encourage us to try as a family! Some of these things (such as the Sunrise Breakfast) we’ve talked about doing before but often they would get crowded out or relegated to the bottom of a long ‘to do’ pile. So, this year I created a little poster for us to remember the adventures we’d like to go on – I’m hoping this will act as a visual reminder to make sure we do get outside and enjoy as much family time as we can! We’ve gone for making all our adventures outdoor ones – mainly because it really helps us all to clock off from work and from our phones. I’m a great one at being distracted by my phone!

Den Building in January

The first adventure we chose was to ‘Build a Den’ because this is quite an easy one for us – the kids tend to build a den whenever we go anywhere near trees and they’re forever building them in our garden too! So we wrapped up on a cold January weekend, packed a flask of hot chocolate and set off to Keston Ponds for a den building adventure. I think the kids were most excited about their cup of hot chocolate but we did manage to climb a few trees, build a den and throw stones on a frozen lake (have you ever heard what an amazingly echo-y sound this makes?!)

Our February adventure is Geocaching. We have tried geocaching before but it wasn’t our most successful outdoor family adventure! You can read all about it here. We popped it on our list because we were keen to try it again and particularly as the kids get older, I think this will be something outdoors that they’ll really enjoy so we’re on the lookout for a good geocaching spot near us for one of the next few weekends!

I’m really looking forward to Our 12 Family Adventures. It’s a lovely thing to do mind you, to look back at the month that has just passed and celebrate it visually. Hopefully in the years to come #12familyadventures will serve to jog the memory and to capture our life’s little family bits.

We’d love it if you’d join in our #12familyadventures too! Hopefully you’d like to try geo-caching in February? Share your adventures on instagram using the hashtag or better yet join our facebook group where we’ll be sharing lots of tips and our experiences. Happy Adventuring!