It was a pretty serious blow when I found out that we couldn't go on vacation this year. My wife and I both work very hard, but usually we are able to synchronize our vacations. That didn't happen this summer. We have a few days of overlap, but definitely not enough time to get out of town. We knew that we would have, at most, a day or two at a time to spend with their kids. Besides that, the only real summer recreation time we had were a few half days and holiday weekends. Although we could technically takes mini vacations, it just didn't seem worth it. All of that packing and driving just to spend a day on the beach? No thanks! Instead, we decided to make our own fun right in our own backyard.
The idea of backyard fun was pretty foreign to my family up until this summer. The backyard swing set, once the center of attention, had been neglected for years. We have three kids of varying ages, so we had to find some backyard games that would work for everyone. The first thing we thought of, of course, was croquet. Although teenagers may roll their eyes and grown, croquet is still one of the best forms of backyard fun for the whole family. Everyone, from the smallest to the biggest, can play this game.
Of course, for the older kids and grownups, badminton is an excellent form of backyard fun. What's so great about this game is that it doesn't require anything but a net, paddles, and a birdie. You don't need a court or any specialized equipment to play it. You can buy a whole badminton set for under 50 dollars if you find it at the right place. Even my teenage daughter got into it once she realized that, every now and then, she could beat her old man.
Of course, we also had plenty of backyard water fun. Although we didn't have a pool, we did have some squirt guns and water balloons. I thought this would be a great game, but it got a little bit too competitive pretty quickly. At first it was good clean backyard fun, but then my littlest one got hit in the head with a water balloon and started crying. That ended that game pretty quickly. We decided to break out the bocce ball set instead. That was the kind of backyard fun where no one would get hurt.
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