How to have the best Staycation EVER! {Part 1}

My husband recently had a week off and we decided instead of going anywhere we were going to have a staycation!! Now my kids were a little disappointed that we weren’t headed to California because they didn’t want to spend the week doing nothing!

To ease their concerns we made up some guidelines for us all to follow along with so it would be a REAL vacation! We brainstormed and wrote out our rules on our white board for the week

RULE 1

No chores and laundry! So to make this work for us we had everyone pick one chore that needed to be done to keep our house functioning. We picked vacuum family room (we have two dogs so this is a must!), empty dishwasher, feed and water dogs, and sweep the tile. Normally they each have 3 chores so they were happy with this.

RULE 2

No T.V. and electronics! My kids of course complained about this one but the point of our week was to spend more time together as a family so we did have a couple movie nights together but we didn’t want the girls sitting around watch shows all day long or playing electronics. They were allowed to use their electronic devices in the car because we spent a lot of time driving around to different activities. They didn’t feel like they were being punished and I didn’t have to constantly tell them to put away their stuff.

RULE 3

No outside activities. We wanted to spend the whole week together just like we would if we went out of town so this meant no play dates or school activities. The only exception to this was my oldest daughter had a church activity one night for an hour.

RULE 4

No whining! We made these guidelines as a family and we didn’t want to hear complaining all week about it so we made sure everyone agreed and understood the rules ahead of time!

RULE 5

Set up designated times for your vactation. We knew we wanted to do some spring cleaning so we set aside Monday morning to get our house all in order. We did some deep cleaning and got all the laundry washed and put away. So we set up our vacation for 12 pm on Monday to Saturday at 12 am.

Now that our plan was made we were ready for our vacation!!! Check back next week for all the fun things we did that you can do too!