Enjoying our Happy Place with Butterkist | AD

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Did you know that the average Brit feels true happiness 432 times a year? A survey by Butterkist has revealed that on a normal day-to-day basis the majority of the people in the UK are happy with their lives. I’d like to think this was true – I’m happy with our family life all the time. Yes, there are hard days and times when things don’t go to plan but under that we have our health, each other, jobs and our home. We really don’t have much to be unhappy about.

But, as much as we love our home we don’t spend a huge amount of time there – often going away for weekends and school holidays and not really making the most of the family time together at home, doing simple things that we all enjoy. So Butterkist sent us a special delivery to help us take some time out and spend some quality time together as a family.

In our lives we are constantly on the go. I have my blog work, Dave works and the children have school and swimming lessons. Often, when the children are home from school they’ll be doing homework, helping me prepare dinner and maybe baking a cake but we don’t often get a chunk of time to be able to sit and play together, all four of us.

The children have so many games and they love to play them together but playing them as a family is something we really have to make time for. So this week the children picked out their favourite games and sat down with us around the dining table to have an afternoon of playing.

I made sure we had plenty of drinks and snacks – with tubs of Butterkist within easy reach and the children showed us how to play their games. They are so good at turn based games now and taking it in turns to play gives them a chance to chat and eat whilst waiting for their turn.

In the end we played game after game and had one of the nicest afternoons – that spread into the evening – that we have had in a long time. We ended up just cooking a pizza for dinner, eating whilst we played and the children had such a nice time with us. We got to talk about our day, talk about our plans for the rest of the week and just open up and relax together. It was lovely.

This is now something that we’ll be doing regularly – making the time to have simple fun with our favourite people in our happy place. It’s something that we should do without even thinking about it but often life gets in the way – and you have to pencil in those chunks of quality time before housework and other odd jobs get there first.

The Butterkist survey showed that family, friends, hobbies and interests were some of the top things that make us happy – and I agree completely. These are the things that make our world go round – family, friends and doing things we all enjoy. But it doesn’t have to be a big adventure, it can just be an afternoon of board games or watching a movie together. Being together is definitely one thing that makes us all happy.

What things in life make you truly happy?