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Episode 007 - You Can Do Hard Things

Show Notes:

My most downloaded episode, maybe ever, was Episode 007 called You Can Do Hard Things. Today, I'm gonna introduce her sister to you: You Can Do Fun Things. I've decided that this year I wanna make more of these Work & Play episodes about play, and I'm gonna try to be a little more lighthearted, which can be kind of hard for me. But that's the goal for this year, and that's what today's episode is all about—encouraging you (and me) to incorporate more play in your life and to do fun things.

For the full episode, hit play above or read through below.

Well, hello! I am back after taking January off. Thank you to each and every one of you who took the time to answer my survey! I read every answer, I prayed over each of you who responded, and I'm so grateful for all of your words, all of your prayer requests, everything that you shared.

I don't take it lightly at all, that you took the time to do that. And one response said, “Thanks for keeping the lights on over there.” And I thought, man, that is exactly what I needed to hear and how it felt through 2022. I just, I don't know how I did it. I barely kept these podcast lights on all year, but I did it and January was a much needed break for me. So, thank you.

Your responses gave me so much encouragement, great feedback, and I'm feeling genuinely excited about this year. An overwhelming response on the survey: so many of you said yes to the lighthearted, fun, playful episodes. They wanted to hear more of like, what's going on in your life Let's hear about your favorite things or a day in the life, or have your girlfriends come talk or whatever, blah, blah. And I'm like, I love that. I love that you guys are kind of wanting the same thing, which is just more fun and more play.

So I'm gonna do my best with that this year, y’all. I'll still talk about work and I'll still talk about all that good stuff and managing your home and rhythms and all of that, but I'm excited to incorporate more play. All right, so I'm gonna start this episode with stating something that's very obvious, the same way I started out you can do hard things: Life is hard.

And I don't care how old you are. I don't care what gender you are, I don't care how much money you have, I don't care what status you have in life, you're gonna experience really hard things. It's just part of life. But I'm also here to tell you today: life is fun. Life is good. Life is bright and beautiful and rich, and it isn't meant to be something that we trudge through or get through or make it through every day of our lives.

Yes, it's gonna be hard.

It's meant to be hard at times. It's gonna refine us and challenge us, but… it's also meant to be enjoyed.

Life is meant to be fun!

Now, I'm naturally a very serious person. So it's helpful for me to kind of stop and think about how can I, how can Nancy Ray enjoy life a little more and have a little more fun?

And I'm grateful for people in my life who have shown me how to do this and taught me in different ways how to do this. And my husband is very good at this, too, and he brings a lot of fun out of me. So I'm just gonna share some ways really in the last year that we have just tried to incorporate more fun into our lives and how we are planning to do that even more this year.

#1 Plan fun trips!

Plan vacations as a family, plan trips to go on with your husband, plan trips with your best friends. It is so great to have something on your calendar that you're looking forward to. So far, we've gone to Great Wolf Lodge and it was just one night, two days at the waterpark, but it was so much fun, just us as a family of six. We've also got an anniversary trip coming up, I think in this fall. We don't know where we're going yet. Just Will and I are gonna go away somewhere. We also are gonna go skiing, which is crazy, but that's all my husband's doing. So we're gonna go snow skiing and visit his cousins out west. And we're gonna go to Disney World.

Okay, right now it's starting to get really out of hand. I realize this travel this year is already so hype. I don't think I'm ready for it, but the bottom line is, we have a lot of fun trips planned to look forward to. And it just does something good for your heart when you set aside that time to just cut loose and have fun.

#2 Be Intentional About Having a Sabbath

This year, we are really trying to be more intentional about having a Sabbath as a family. When you really practice Sabbath as a family, it helps you to make space not only for rest, which of course it's supposed to be restful and worshipful, but it makes space for fun to just spontaneously happen.

You can pull out a board game or go for a hike or do things that are playful and restful that you don't really get the time to do in your day-to-day life.

#3 Try New Ways of Playing as a Family

The third thing we love to do is just find different ways and try new ways of playing as a family. So here are a couple of practical ways that we do that. We have these little question cards that we read at dinner time, and our kids love doing this, but we'll just read one or two question cards and go around the table and answer them.

Another thing that we love to do at dinner is play high low buffalo, which maybe you've heard of it, but you just recount the highest part of your day, the lowest part of your day, and then something random about your day, which can be anything, and you call that the Buffalo.

Reading a great book together has been something that just in the last year, our kids have, not all of them, but most of them, baby Benji, of course, he's still just kind of toddling around and doesn't really engage, but that's okay, but the the big three, they are latching onto these books a little bit more. We read Little Pilgrim's Progress together. That was the first time that really as a family, we caught onto a beautiful new story and appreciated it together. And now we're going through the Narnia books, which is so fun and so sweet. And not necessarily a way that you think playing would happen, but it like takes us to another world. And our kids love that time together, which is really sweet.

We love to go on hikes. It's another way that we just kinda have fun and get outdoors.

We love to play board games and our girls are really getting to the age where they can understand and enjoy board games. We had an intense game of Monopoly going on all of Christmas break, which was really fun.

And then one thing that we try to do every week is have a Friday pizza and movie night as a family. It doesn't always happen, but it's a really fun way to kind of kick off the weekend and start our Sabbath the next day.

#4 Play With Each Kid Individually

Now, pretend play is not my favorite thing. I'll do it, but it can be kind of hard. But, here's the magic of this, okay? When you play with each child one-on-one, here are the rules that we set. We set a timer for 10 minutes and we tell that child, you can choose whatever you wanna do. Sometimes my kids want like a tea party. Usually that's like Milly or Lyndon. When they get Milly-mama time or Lyndon-mama time, it'll be like, we'll pour some lemonade into some mugs and we'll sit there and chat, or maybe we'll paint nails. One rule that we have is we can't watch anything. We don't sit there and watch TV for 10 minutes. It has to be something that we do together, but they get to choose the fun thing that we do. Sometimes we'll play something, pretend in the playroom. That's usually what Beaufort chooses to do. But it's so fun because you know, I can do anything with my kid for 10 minutes. I'm like, I will do whatever you want. And then when that timer goes off, I say, thank you so much, and I give him a hug and we move on.

In addition to these little 10 minute play times that I try to do with the kids, we try to plan date nights with the kids every once in a while. Maybe, I mean, it's not super often, maybe every other month that will will take each girl out on a date night or maybe it's just around their birthday and it's a really sweet time for them to spend one-on-one time together.

And I'm gonna start trying to do this more this year because usually it's just Will that wants to take, take the girls out, but now that Beaufort is getting a little bit older, I wanna take him out. And I also wanna make sure that I'm getting one-on-one time with each of the girls, and that Will's getting one-on-one time with Beaufort. Benji's still too little to do anything, he's like one and a half right now, and so when he gets a little bit older, will incorporate him into that. But just having those special times, just one kid, one parent, it means the world to them. And we're really trying to incorporate that more into our schedules this year.

#5 Laugh Every Chance You Get

If there is an opportunity to laugh as a family or with your kid, you just gotta go for it. So the other night, Milly and I were talking and she was really struggling to pick up her dirty clothes off the floor and put them in the laundry basket. I had to tell her like four times, and she is moving like a turtle.

I'm like, come on Milly, let's go. Let's go pick up your clothes, let's move them out of the way. Like they're in the way on the floor and I was getting more and more frustrated and I sat the girls down and was like, girls we're gonna go over this phrase that I want you to take to heart. Okay, repeat after me, “obey right away, all the way, with a happy heart.” And so they're repeating it after me, obey right away all the way with a happy heart. And I had heard this phrase from my friend earlier that week and I was like, oh, I love that. I'm gonna teach that to my kids. So as they're saying it, Milly goes, okay, right away all the way with a happy fart. And we looked at each other, I said, “Did you just say with a happy fart?” And we laughed so hard, so hard, and Lyndon started laughing. We got so tickled, and this is coming off of kind of, if I'm honest, I was very frustrated, a very intense moment of me being very frustrated. And we just got the giggles after that and it really lightened the mood.

And I thought, you know what? I have a choice here. I can be super strict and be like, this is about obeying. Or I can say, that was pretty funny and we can just laugh about it. And I feel like they were even more receptive to what I was trying to teach them because of that laughter in that moment we had together, which was just so funny. So now, of course all the time they go around saying, “obey all the way, right away, with a happy fart.” And they think it's so funny. But you know what? I'm fine with it. If it gets them to put things away quicker, I'm good with that. But the bottom line is just to engage with them.

If there's a chance for laughter, you just take it. You just gotta roll with it, even in the more serious moments.

#6 Invite Your Friends To Do Something Fun Together

If there's an opportunity for you to do something fun that you wanna do and you can invite a friend to go, (easier said than done, I realize) do it. Just looking at your calendar, seeing if you can go, texting your friend, inviting them, being the one to go first and invite your friend to do something fun. I mean, the worst that can happen is that they say no and that's okay. But just being the the one to invite your friends to go do something fun together is such an easy and great way to have more fun in your life and to enhance those friendships that mean a lot to you.

#7 Incorporate Fun Into The Small Daily Activities of your Life

This one I think might just be the most important one. So for example, I'll give you a couple examples of what we do. Every night after we eat dinner, we say “Clear the table, everybody clear the table, take your plates to the the sink.” And all the kids are like, I don't want to. And we're like, come on, come on, come, let's go, let's go. So we've like made up some “clear the table” songs and tried to do stuff and then the other night Will just put on some loud dance music and we just turned it into like this fun loud music for clearing the table. Some of them were dancing, it just put a pep in everybody's step and they just kind of did it. I was like, that was way more fun.

That's the gold stuff of incorporating some play into your work, just turning on some fun music while you clear the table. Like let's make this chore, which seems like a chore, more lighthearted and fun. And that's what I wanna do more of this year is like, how can we take this one thing and just make it more fun? I wanna be the mom that's a little bit more flexible. If it's a pretty day and they're begging to go to the park, I wanna just take a deep breath and say, yep, let's go. I wanna put my plans aside and just go to the park. And while I'm at the park, cuz sometimes let's be real, it's not always fun for the mom if the kids are playing at the park. But while I'm at the park, I'm like, what? How can I make this playful and fun for me? Can I take my shoes off and put my feet in the grass? Can I like call my friend and say, do you wanna come? What can I do? Can I lay down?

I took the kids, I took all four of them to this park the other day and they all wanted to go play lions in the grass, like away from the playground. And so they did. And I went over there with them and I ended up just laying in the grass and letting the sunshine fall on my face. It felt so good. So just taking those opportunities for ourselves as well to just play more and have more fun. Finding a good book for yourself also I feel like is key. While your kids are resting or busy doing something else, if you can just get in like 10 minutes of good reading time in the afternoon, it's blissful. It's so fun just to do that, and then just go right back around with your day. It doesn't have to be super long. You don't have to take a full-on nap, just like a little bit here and there. So fun.

And the last example I'll share with you is when we clean up our playroom, which is like the most agonizing chore ever for the kids because they love making a mess and they hate cleaning it up.

We created this game where I have my phone and I put them all on like different spots in the playroom and I'll say, “Milly, go!” And we have like music going and I'll time her. I'll say, you're in charge of books. Go. So she'll have to go around the playroom, get all the books, put 'em on the bookshelf, and then she'll sit down and I'll tell her how long it took. 30 seconds, great job. “Lyndon, go!” and Lyndon will. She's in charge of like the dollhouse that says she'll get all the dollhouse accessories and puts 'em up and go. I'll be honest, sometimes this works out really well and sometimes it doesn't and we just end up putting on music and cleaning up the playroom together.

But when it works out, they think that it is a fun game to play while cleaning the playroom. They also don't have any concept of time. So if it takes someone like 90 seconds to do something and the other kid like 12, we celebrate them equally and they have no idea. They're just like, yeah, that was awesome. So while the kids are young, it's kind of fun to do things like that where they don't understand totally what it means to try to beat your time, but they're doing a great job anyway. But incorporating fun into the small daily activities and chores is definitely something that I wanna try to prioritize more this year.

So whether it's planning a fun trip somewhere, or just turning kitchen cleanup time into a dance party, you can do fun things. You can! Sometimes you have to plan it into your calendar and sometimes it happens unexpectedly. But when it happens, my hope is that you embrace it more often this year and that your life is a bit brighter and happier because of it. Doing fun things is always within arm's reach. It might take trying something new or having a different perspective on something that you've always done one way and trying it a different way, but you can do it. Get creative, laugh every chance that you get.

You can do fun things.

Charles Spurgeon said,