Now that the weather is improving I’ve been thinking about things we can do outside as a family. We have our usual list of outdoor activities: we take the dog for long walks, ride our bikes and we enjoy hiking and exploring local trails. But a couple summers ago we did something fun and I am keen to recreate it again this summer.

We called it Family Freeze Ta, and we did something we don’t normally do…we invited other families to join us in the park.

It is crazy easy. I sent an email around to a few of our neighbours asking if they wanted to meet us at the park for an after-dinner game of freeze tag.

Sidebar: Do you remember freeze tag? Someone is IT and everyone else scatters. If the person who’s IT touches another player, they’re “frozen” until a second player hustles over and crawls between their legs, thus unfreezing them and setting them free. If a player is frozen three times it’s their turn to be IT. To make it easier (mostly because the field in which we were playing was so huge) the person who was tagged three times became IT as well. So the number of people who were IT grew the longer we played.

A few families couldn’t make it but I was amazed to see that somehow we managed to collect about 18 people(!) for a playdate in the park. The youngest player was about four, the oldest was, well, our age. (In other words, OLD.) We played an exhausting round of freeze tag at the park. And then another. And then some of the kids ran races. And then we played a different game. And then the kids played on the playground equipment.

And then we all trudged home, sweaty and red-faced.

Our impromptu playdate was a big success and so easy too. It was a great way to exercise and squeeze in some social time as well. What’s more, it pretty much guaranteed a good night’s sleep for everyone involved.

What type of games do you like to play at the park with your kids?