It’s summer! You can feel the warm days and balmy nights chase away the memory of a chilly winter. You can make the most of those perfect summer evenings by spending time outside relaxing on your deck.

• With the Kids
• Spend family evenings together cooking out, barbecuing, or having picnics with your family.
• Play outside with your children. Spend an evening playing catch, tag, or hide-and-seek with your kids (and any friends they have over) until everyone is tired. Then everyone comes up to the deck for cool drinks or snacks.
• Plan a treasure hunt for the kids. Hide a favorite treat, game, small toys, or a movie to watch after. Make up a lot of sequential clues, hide them all over the yard, give the kids the first clue, then watch them run all over until they find the treasure.
• Perhaps you’re not feeling active – set up board games on a table and play until the sun goes down – and then light some lamps and keep going. Maybe you enjoy all of these things; there are plenty of delightful evenings coming up!
• With Your Friends and Family
• Have friends over and make it an outdoor party!
• Maybe you’ve added an outdoor kitchen or pizza oven. Lay out dishes of toppings or shish kebab ingredients and let everyone put together their favorites for individually chosen treats.
• Choose a theme. Maybe from your favorite TV show – dress up as characters, have foods that were shown on the show, play darts with pictures of your least/most favorite characters. Maybe you play messy Twister. And then have a water fight to rinse off. Or have everyone bring the weirdest food they’ve got in their pantry.
• Or maybe you just want to have food and hang out – any more organization than making sure there are napkins and drinks is too much stress. They’re all great ways to spend time with your loved (or just liked) ones.
• By Yourself – Maybe what you like best is relaxing by yourself, sitting on a deckchair reading, listening to music, or just looking over your garden as the twilight grows around you. You can certainly plan for that too. Hang a hammock, or build some comfy seats into your deck. Plant some fragrant flowers around the place, and relax in your own mini-paradise, right out your back door.