Pool & Backyard Activity Hacks For Your Family

If you have a backyard you love, carefully landscaped to create a pleasing environment, and you have a pool to go with it, you’re in an incredibly fortunate position. You have many entertainment options right at home for yourself, your friends, and your family.

But what do you do with these features? If you have a pool and a grill located somewhere, that means swimming, and barbecue meals to make memories with, but there’s more to your pool and yard than that. And these family hacks can help your family to get more out of the yard and pool besides swimming and eating.  

Recycle Your Pool Noodles

The “pool noodle” is a piece of long, cylindrical, polyethylene foam that is buoyant, and so often used as “training wheels” for children to assist in learning how to swim. However, once that stage is complete, and your kids enjoy the freedom of swimming in the water, what then?

Rather than throwing your pool noodles into the trash, you can be creative. Take those pool noodles and recycle them into different uses. They can be used as a “beverage boat” to hold drinks and send them along the pool to other locations. They can be turned into watercraft for toys your children may have so that they can continue their adventures in the water. There are many different possibilities for pool noodles rather than consigning them to the trash.

Run Summer Camp At Home

Maybe you and your kids have had the experience of summer camp during vacation. Maybe you haven’t. One way or the other, you can have exactly the kind of summer camp experience you want if you conduct it at home instead.

Whether you want to follow a traditional summer camp curriculum of roasting marshmallows at night before retiring to a tent, or you want to make your own agenda of things you always felt summer camp should do have fun with it! Coming up with summer camp activities, especially in a yard with a pool in it, is a great family experience.

Have A Movie Night

Today, most people think of movie night as marching to the home theater or “man cave” room, with some popcorn and drinks, and watching a family movie in high definition, with surround sound. However, with a little ingenuity, the use of a projector, and a willingness to go back to the great outdoors, you can turn your backyard into an outdoor “drive-in movie” style venue.

Loosen up with movie night watch it as a family outside. If you have a pool, you can even add a bit of novelty and lounge in the water, or on top of it, for a unique experience. This is a lot easier if your home theater system already uses a rear-projection system, but if you don’t have this, there are other alternatives, so you don’t have to move your 4K flatscreen TV and/or speakers outside.

Start A Water Fight

While it’s mostly the 1990s that the “super soaker” water gun is associated with, the old fashioned water fight is a timeless activity. You can have a lot of fun in a yard or pool with a water fight, and you can even mix things up by bringing color into it.

One variation on a traditional water fight is to load up water guns with non-toxic dyes and let people fight in white t-shirts. You get some crazy colored designs out of such a fight, and the dyes themselves can safely wash away as long as they’re still wet, so clean up is easy for the parts of the yard you don’t want permanently colored.

Play Watermelon Ball

In the old days, they used an actual watermelon for this pool game. Today, you can buy a synthetic product that will last you your lifetime, so you’re probably better off with that purchase. Watermelons were originally used as a type of ball for a rugby/soccer/football variation in swimming pools.

The reason the watermelon was chosen was that it was “neutrally buoyant,” meaning that it didn’t rise to the surface of the water, nor did it sink like a stone. This made it quite manageable as a sports ball for swimming pools. If you want to play a game in your pool where you can get away with dribbling and kicking underwater, then study up on the rules for watermelon ball, and get the family involved. It’s a great activity for everyone.