Family Bucket List

fun things we want to do together

A list of everything your family wants to do together - the big trips, the small ones, the thing your seven-year-old has asked for six times. Write them all down. Then every year pick a handful off the list and actually do them.

GET THE KIT

HOW IT WORKS

A big list, revisited often,
picked from every year.

HOW IT WORKS

Write a list. Pick from it every year.

Write the big list

Kitchen table, everybody there. People call out things they want to do together and it all goes down - no vetoes, no budget talk, no "we'll see." Sleep in the car. See snow. Eat at that place with the fish tank. Aim for fifty, be happy with twenty. handwriting.

Pick this year's few

Then the hard part: choose three to five for the year ahead. One from each person is the fairest way to do it. Write them on the year page, put a rough month beside each, and that's it- those ones are happening. The rest of the list waits. It isn't going anywhere.

Do them, and write what happened

Tick it off that night, while you still smell like the beach or the theme park! Write one line about what actually happened. Document that you ticked an item off your Family Bucket List.

Do it again next year

Pick a date you'll remember - New Year's Day, the last night of the holidays, the Sunday before school goes back - and get the list out again. Read last year's ideas out loud. Add whatever they've thought of since. Pick again.

The list will always grow faster than you tick it. It's improtant to know that's not it failing, that's it working.

WHY IT WORKS

It's a plan, and a record.

Families don't run short of ideas. They run short of places to put them. Someone says "we should do that" in the car, everyone agrees, and it's gone by the next roundabout. A list on the fridge is the whole difference between an idea and a plan.

Picking from a list is also far easier than deciding from scratch.

What you're really building, though, is a record. Ten years in, that sheet is a document of who your family was - the handwriting changing, the ideas getting braver, bigger, things crossed out because you did them, things still open because you never got round to it. Keep it somewhere it's allowed to get old. Sticky-taped inside a cupboard door is perfect.

You're not making a to-do list. You're keeping a record of what your family wanted.

MAKE IT YOURS

Make it fit your family

One a month, small

If a year feels slow with little kids, run twelve tiny ones instead of five big ones. Everything free or nearly free - a night walk, breakfast in the car, the bus to the end of the line and back.

A page each

Kids years apart want completely different things. Give each child their own page and do one of theirs every year. Nobody has to compromise, and every kid gets a turn at being the one whose idea the whole family does.

Older kids & teens

Work out how many summers you've actually got left with them at home, and make the list exactly that long. Eleven summers, eleven things. It changes what makes the cut. Fair warning: this version is a gut punch.

FREE PRINTABLE

Family Bucket List

Two pages. The list you keep adding to, and the bucket you fill in each year.

The Big List — 48 numbered lines, a box to tick, and room for whose idea it was
Space for your family name and the year you started, so the sheet dates itself
This Year's Bucket List — a bucket you write this year's few picks into, with a box to tick when each one is done
Two lines under every pick for what actually happened, written the night you do it

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