Spending Quality Time with Your Children: What Worked for Us

Create Family Bonds and Lasting Traditions

In our family, quality time often happened when least expected - when we simply grabbed hold of whatever moments came our way. Although we sometimes came upon them by accident, these favorite activities, products and moments became a part of our family's cherished times together:

Blank books opened the pages to quality time, letting our thoughts, artworks and discoveries fill the pages

Whether you buy inexpensive blank books from your local used bookstore or from online booksellers like Amazon, they can be great starting points for building family bonds and creating heirlooms. They are also ideal for saving children's art projects and drawings. Sometimes we would go around the neighborhood and try to list all the things we saw, sometimes picking one color (red or blue, for instance) to sharpen our observational skills.

On our last excursion, we searched only for red objects and came home with a list which included a wine-colored leaf, a piece of string, a clothing label and a rock with one reddish speck on on it. Our kids have used blank books to write about turning points are well, from the last leaf glimpsed on a tree before winter's arrival or the last time they sucked their thumbs. Such touching and pivotal moments deserve to be captured.

Helpful websites: find blank books at gift shops, stationary stores and Amazon

Photos can be an instant springboard to quality memories - and time - spent together

We had plenty of photos but didn't always have time to put them in scrapbooks and photo albums. Although I didn't go out of the way to tell the kids this secret, I liked to let our photos build up for a bit and then spend an afternoon of quality time going through them, putting them in albums and chatting about favorite moments. Inevitably, one kid would say "Remember when...?" when a particular Christmas or other photo set off a round of memories.

Alternately, we'd take old family photos and put them in special displays or decorate picture frames and showcase the results. This time spent together inevitably left us feeling closer and reminded us of our family's history and traditions.