“I’m bored!” “I don’t have anything to do!” “This is boring!”
“What can I do?” Do your kids say these things all the time too?
Are you broke too?
So what do we do as a family for entertainment when we don’t
have any money?
Movies
There was a time when we had to turn off cable and the
internet to help cut down our expenses in order to pay our bills. I was super
spoiled with my DVR
and hated having to turn that off! I just thought I was going to die without my
favorite shows! We just watched antenna TV, Redbox,
or movies that we already had on the wall. After a certain bill was paid off,
we turned on basic internet. When another bill was paid off, we got Netflix. Later we added Amazon
Prime, so now we have gotten used to not having cable TV. Now I’m spoiled
being able to watch an entire season of our favorite television show all at
once! It’s astonishing what you can get used to when you have to. And we can
put up with not having something as long as we keep telling ourselves that it’s
only temporary until we can afford it again.
When we got sick of trying to watch the three fuzzy channels,
and after we had seen all of our own movies way too many times, we found a
surprisingly amazing resource for FREE. The library
has a fairly big selection of movies that you can check out for free, either on
DVD or even online.
Books
When we finally realized that there is nothing on TV to
watch, then we remembered how much we used to love to read! We would spend an
hour at the library just looking for books, but now we go online to search for
what we want to read. We can either download it to read, or we can request a
book to check out and they email us when it is ready to be picked up. If you
don’t know what you want to read, they have convenient lists available by age
and genre. Just ask the librarian at the desk, they are usually very happy to
help.
Summer
The library has a wonderful activities calendar during the summer for all ages! They have story time, movie time, craft activities, concerts, author visits, and guest speakers. One time I went to the library and there just happened to be a flower show and I came home with a free orchid! You never know what you’ll find at the library!
So what do you do as a family for entertainment when you don’t have any money?
